Open web in new tab Selenium + Python

So I am trying to open websites on new tabs inside my WebDriver. I want to do this, because opening a new WebDriver for each website takes about 3.5secs using PhantomJS, I want more speed...

I'm using a multiprocess python script, and I want to get some elements from each page, so the workflow is like this:

Open Browser

Loop throught my array
For element in array -> Open website in new tab -> do my business -> close it

But I can't find any way to achieve this.

Here's the code I'm using. It takes forever between websites, I need it to be fast... Other tools are allowed, but I don't know too many tools for scrapping website content that loads with JavaScript (divs created when some event is triggered on load etc) That's why I need Selenium... BeautifulSoup can't be used for some of my pages.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import multiprocessing, time, pika, json, traceback, logging, sys, os, itertools, urllib, urllib2, cStringIO, mysql.connector, shutil, hashlib, socket, urllib2, re
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from PIL import Image
from os import listdir
from os.path import isfile, join
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from pprint import pprint

def getPhantomData(parameters):
    try:
        # We create WebDriver
        browser = webdriver.Firefox()
        # Navigate to URL
        browser.get(parameters['target_url'])
        # Find all links by Selector
        links = browser.find_elements_by_css_selector(parameters['selector'])

        result = []
        for link in links:
            # Extract link attribute and append to our list
            result.append(link.get_attribute(parameters['attribute']))
        browser.close()
        browser.quit()
        return json.dumps({'data': result})
    except Exception, err:
        browser.close()
        browser.quit()
        print err

def callback(ch, method, properties, body):
    parameters = json.loads(body)
    message = getPhantomData(parameters)

    if message['data']:
        ch.basic_ack(delivery_tag=method.delivery_tag)
    else:
        ch.basic_reject(delivery_tag=method.delivery_tag, requeue=True)

def consume():
    credentials = pika.PlainCredentials('invitado', 'invitado')
    rabbit = pika.ConnectionParameters('localhost',5672,'/',credentials)
    connection = pika.BlockingConnection(rabbit)
    channel = connection.channel()

    # Conectamos al canal
    channel.queue_declare(queue='com.stuff.images', durable=True)
    channel.basic_consume(callback,queue='com.stuff.images')

    print ' [*] Waiting for messages. To exit press CTRL^C'
    try:
        channel.start_consuming()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pass

workers = 5
pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=workers)
for i in xrange(0, workers):
    pool.apply_async(consume)

try:
    while True:
        continue
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    print ' [*] Exiting...'
    pool.terminate()
    pool.join()

Editor's note: This answer no longer works for new Selenium versions. Refer to this comment.

You can achieve the opening/closing of a tab by the combination of keys COMMAND + T or COMMAND + W (OSX). On other OSs you can use CONTROL + T / CONTROL + W.

In selenium you can emulate such behavior. You will need to create one webdriver and as many tabs as the tests you need.

Here it is the code.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.google.com/")

#open tab
driver.find_element_by_tag_name('body').send_keys(Keys.COMMAND + 't') 
# You can use (Keys.CONTROL + 't') on other OSs

# Load a page 
driver.get('http://stackoverflow.com/')
# Make the tests...

# close the tab
# (Keys.CONTROL + 'w') on other OSs.
driver.find_element_by_tag_name('body').send_keys(Keys.COMMAND + 'w') 


driver.close()