Introduction to Selenium 4

In this tutorial we will discuss on Introduction to Selenium 4. This tutorial will help you to understand all the upgraded and new features of Selenium 4. We all have worked on Selenium 3 version earlier.

Objective:

• Introduction to Selenium
• History of Selenium
• Features of Selenium 4
• Improvements in Selenium 4
• Deprecation in Selenium 4

Introduction to Selenium

All techies are very much comfortable to work with Selenium 3 version. But Selenium 4 version upgraded lots of features which makes your testing life easier. You can test several scenario easily with selenium 4 version which was not available in Selenium 3 version.

So are you excited to know more about Selenium 4 version and all the features of it? I will make you understand about the Selenium 4 with practical Scenarios.

History of Selenium

Before going deep into Selenium 4, let’s remind some facts about Selenium history.

Mostly 4 person is behind the design selenium automation testing tool.

• Jason Huggins from ThoughtWorks, Chicago
• Paul Hammant from ThoughtWorks
• Shinya Kasatani
• Simon Stewart at ThoughtWorks

Jason Huggins build core mode of Selenium which was known as “JavaScriptTestRunner” in the year 2004. After some years, Paul Hammant build Selenium 1 / Selenium RC. Shinya Kasatani developed Selenium IDE which added the heart to selenium. In 2007, Simon Stewart developed another automation testing tool Selenium WebDriver. It was not rely on the JavaScript. This is known as Selenium 2 now a days.

So this is some glimpse of Selenium History.  Then What about Selenium 4?

Simon Stewart introduced the Selenium in 2018 publicly in Twitter.

Currently Latest version of Selenium is 4.0.0-beta-4 but this is not stable version till now. They are working on this to make it stable and ready to work in industry with and stable version of Selenium 4.

If you want to download the Beta version of Beta version of Selenium 4 then you can navigate to this URL (https://www.selenium.dev/downloads/).

Now let’s  understand what the features of Selenium 4 are.

Features of Selenium 4

• In Selenium 4, the encoding and decoding of an API related to JSON Wire Protocol and communication between Browsers and Test script has been eliminated. In Selenium 3, JSON Wire Protocol APIs are used to communicate between Browsers and Test Script. you can Follow “ https://www.testinglpoint.com/selenium-webdriver ” URL to know about JSON Wire Protocol and how it is used on Selenium 3.
• Because of above features, now in Selenium 4, WebDriver is communicating with the browsers directly.
• Selenium 4 has terminated the support for Opera & Phantom JS which was available In selenium 3.  Because in Selenium 4, WebDriver implementation for Opera and Phantom JS is not available.
• If we want to test some scenarios in Opera, then we can test those scenarios in Chrome Browsers and Opera Browser is basically based on Chromium.
• Like Opera, if we want to test some scenarios in Phantom JS, the we can test those scenarios in Chrome and Firefox in headless mode. It will be the same impact.
• Selenium 4 introduced the Enhanced & Upgraded Selenium Grid which comes with Docker support.
• Like Selenium Grid, Selenium 4 version also introduced the upgraded version of Selenium IDE.
• We can take the screenshot of specific Web Element in Selenium 4 version.
• It has W3 Standardization and Improved Documentation which makes all techies life easy to work with Selenium.
• It has introduced some Relative locators, Chrome Debugging tool which makes life easier to locate the element very quickly and simulate the network.
• Addition to locators, it has added the features as to support Geolocation Testing.
• Some Actions class has been modified in Selenium 4. Addition to this features it has added the monitoring tools in Selenium 4

Addition to some advanced features, some functions are also deprecated in Selenium 4. Below are the list of the features are deprecated in Selenium 4.

Deprecation in Selenium 4

In Selenium 4, below features are deprecated.

• Desired Capabilities
• Opera Browsers Driver
• Phantom JS Driver
• FindsBy
• Actions
  • Click
  • clickAndHold
  • contextClick
  • doubleClick
  • release
• Fluent Wait Timeout

So, now we have discussed what the features are and what are deprecated in Selenium 4.

Improvements vs New Features

Let’s classify all those feature in to 2 part.

• Improvement in Selenium 4
• New Features in Selenium 4
• Improvements
  • Improved Docker support
  • Improved identification of parent frame directly
  • Grid Concept -Some commands like URL have been changed @ improved in Selenium Grid
• New Features
  • Support for Chromium driver and Microsoft Edge Browsers
  • Native support for Chrome Dev Tools Instead of JSON Wire Protocol
  • Selenium 4 has Native support for W3C Standard
  • Support of Relative locators
  • New Window & Tab Management

Summary:

• Jason Huggins build core mode of Selenium which was known as “JavaScriptTestRunner” in the year 2004.
• After some years, Paul Hammant build Selenium 1 / Selenium RC.
• Shinya Kasatani developed Selenium IDE which added the heart to selenium. In 2007.
• Simon Stewart developed another automation testing tool (Selenium WebDriver) which did not rely on the JavaScript.
• So, in Selenium 4, the encoding and decoding of an API related to JSON Wire Protocol and communication between Browsers and Test script has been eliminated. Selenium 3 uses JSON Wire Protocol APIs to communicate between Browsers and Test Script.
• Addition to some advanced features, some functions deprecated in Selenium 4. Below are the list of the features are deprecated in Selenium 4.