In this section, we will concentrate on Selenium RC. Selenium RC is also generally called in other way as Selenium 1. If you read the History of Selenium in earlier section, you will come to know that Selenium Remote Control was the most important tool for automation testing before the WebDriver.
But now after WebDriver come to the industry in 2006, WebDriver become the most used and powerful tool for automation Testing.
Let’s discuss what are the advantages of Selenium WebDriver over Selenium Remote control.
- Both RC and WebDriver support the multiple language to design the test script. But communicating / establishing the connection between driver to browser will be faster in Web Driver than RC. Because in RC connection is happening through the medium called RC. But in WebDriver, connection is happening directly to Browser.
2. In case of Selenium API, WebDriver commands are very easy to understand and use. RC still contains the redundancy and confusion to understand the commands. WebDriver command is more used now as days rather than RC.
For Example, to perform the click action. You need only one function called Click. But in case of Selenium RC there are several function to call click action which may create confusion like click or mouseDown, click or mouseAt , type or typeKeys etc.
3. When you come to headless browser, Selenium WebDriver is the best option to use, One of the headless browsers is HtmlUnit. This is termed as “headless” because it is GUI less i.e invisible browser.
This is very fast as there is no waiting time to load the browser. As you don’t have any visual browser to work on it, you need to control through automation script only.
This feature is not supported by Selenium RC.
4. When you come to performance issue, Selenium WebDriver is better than RC as it is directly communicating to browser. In Selenium RC, RC Server acts as a “middle man” between selenium command and browser.