When we first did some investigation around the file download problem, everybody was raving about AutoIt on the Selenium users list, so that has got to be a good solution, right?

AutoIt is a scripting language that is only designed to automate a Windows GUI. This is great when you are working with Windows, but our CI server is running on Linux.

We could work around this problem by adding a build agent that runs Windows for our Selenium tests, but we would then have lost cross-browser compatibility. Dealing with downloads in Safari is going to be especially tricky since the only version worth supporting runs on OS X.

We also have to think about our developers. They are running a mixture of machines: Windows, Linux, and OS X. If we implement an AutoIt solution, we are stopping a large percentage of our developers from running the build locally unless we start supplying them with VMs. Creating VMs so that we can run a single-file download sounds a bit like overkill.

It looks like AutoIt is not for us.