What is Selenium – The Latest Test Automation Tool

Selenium is one of the leading test automation tools within the industry, serves the aim of test automation at its best. The primary ever Selenium tool was launched within the year 2004 as Selenium Core. The Selenium test automation service features a few additions within the year 2007- Selenium IDE & Selenium Web Driver.

The latest version of the selenium tool is Selenium 4.0, but before this, Selenium named Selenium 2 (2011), Selenium 3 (2016). The discharge had been delayed and an attempt version of selenium- Selenium 4.0 alpha was released. Let`s have a look at the new additions and modifications that are made.

What`s New?

SELENIUM IDE: The Selenium IDE supports a rapid test development process and it doesn't need a piece of intensive programming knowledge.

SELENIUM WEB DRIVER: The Selenium WebDriver may be a user friendly and incorporates a flexible API available in most of the popular programming languages and browsers.

SELENIUM GRID: The Selenium Grid is another new upgrade that permits to distribute and run tests across multiple machines/ systems.

Upgraded Features well

Selenium 4 Alpha has upgraded into Selenium 4.0 by the Automation testing industry. the subsequent features will be spotted within the Selenium 4 version;

1. Web Driver Changed To W3c (World Wide Web Consortium) Standardization:

To encourage compatibility across various software implementations of the Web Driver API the selenium 4 features a change in standardization. this alteration ensures that the communication doesn't require the encoding and decoding of API. This ends up in a more stable framework and reduces compatibility issues across various web browsers.

2. Improved Selenium Grid

The terms of its UI and stability has been improved in the Selenium grid. The coding of the Selenium grid has been changed completely and also the console of the grid has been restructured. this permits the execution of the test cases in parallel on multiple browsers and operating systems. Now, the Grid can serve the aim of the Node and Hub.

The UI grid of Selenium 4 has been created to be more user friendly and has all the relevant information regarding the session’s capacity, run time, and other such details. Another addition to the grid is that the support for utilizing the Docker containers together with the grid server.

3. Friendly/ Relative Locators Introduced

Selenium provides multiple explicit locators like id, XPath, etc… the new locator provides how to locate the element by its position by concerning other elements like above, below, to-left-of, to-right-of & near.

4. Support For Browsers

The existing support for Opera & PhantomJS is to be removed. Users who wish to check Opera can choose Chrome and users who wish to check PhanthomJS can choose Chrome or Firefox within the headless mode. The HTML unit isn't any more neglect the Selenium server.

5. Selenium IDE (Chrome & Firefox):

The Selenium IDE could be a tool for recording and playback options which is offered with more advanced features and capabilities.

6. New Plug-in

The old version of Selenium IDE might be run only on Google Chrome, but the most recent version of Selenium 4`s plug-in allows the user to run Selenium on any browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc…) which may declare the seller location strategy.

7. New CLI Runner

The latest version of the new CLI runner could be a WebDriver that's supported Node.JS codes. this offers the capabilities of Playback and parallel execution for supporting parallel execution and further helps in providing reports (test reports- pass & fail).

8. Detailed Documentation

The users of Selenium face many difficulties like late updating of documentation. The new release promises to deliver updated documentation.

9. Better Analysis

There have been enhancements in terms of analysis- Logging & debugging details are improvised to lock the resolution of the script issues for the testers.

10. Network & Performance Analyzers

In terms of network analyzers, capabilities like Intercepting requests, Emulating network conditions by changing the kind of connection, enabling network tracking has been revised.

In terms of performance analyzers, there have been updates on the support for chromium-based edge browser, page screenshot on Firefox & element level screenshots. Also, performance package analyzers give the supply to analyze the runtime performance by providing some methods for collecting and reporting the duration metrics.

With the introduction of the many new test automation tools and techniques within the automation testing industry, the Selenium test automation tool is often a foothold over them thanks to its combined potential to attend to several testing needs of organizations.

Selenium 4.0 gives the user the most effective experience and capability to try and do all the unfulfilled tasks by its previous versions. it's faster, more compatible making it the foremost efficient automation tool in the market.

Explore your knowledge at Selenium Online Training at 3RI Technologies.