As described here: http://forums.openqa.org/thread.jspa?threadID=5124

We should extend getNewBrowserSession (and thereby the DefaultSelenium constructor in all of the clients) to optionally take an additional argument, where you could specify additional options. Here's some stuff I could imagine people wanting to specify, and how they'd specify it:

&1=*iexplore&2=http://x&3=proxyInjectionMode
(would allow us to get rid of *piiexplore)

&1=*iexplore&2=http://x&3=multiWindow
(no explicit need for the command-line argument)

&1=*iexplore&2=http://x&3=proxyInjectionMode,port:4445
(would allow us to open new ports for PI mode at session launch time, allowing us to support multiple sessions in PI mode)

&1=*iexplore&2=http://x&3=mshta
&1=*firefox&2=http://x&3=chrome
(MSHTA and Chrome are just modes of using IE and Firefox... why call them different browsers?)

And we can always combine options:

&1=*firefox&2=http://x&3=chrome,profileTemplate:c:\blah

I'd still want to support the old names/modes for backwards compatibility, but this seems like a good idea to me.

Oh, and, while we're at it, maybe get rid of the "*"?

(The star is really there for historical reasons. If you omitted the star, we used to assume you meant to use a custom browser, but we quickly learned that was confusing ["firefox" means run firefox from the path directly without modifying it, whereas "*firefox" means use logic to calculate the firefox location and modify its profile heavily]. It was clearly the right decision to demand that you call it "custom" if you wanted to use a custom browser.)

If we did remove the star, we might even want to do this:

&1=firefox&2=http://x&3=executable:c:\blah\firefox.exe