In last section, we have discussed about the Upgraded Selenium IDE. Now in this section, we will discuss about the W3C Standardization introduced in Selenium 4.
Objective
- What is W3C
- Architectural Changes in Selenium 4
- Deprecation of Opera & Phantom JS drivers
- Advantages of new Selenium 4 Architecture
- Improved Documentation
What is W3C?
W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium. W3C as the internal community, it develops the web standardization. Every Web Developer will follow this standard to code their requirement, so that the standard of the application will be maintained uniquely.
Architectural Changes in Selenium 4
If we consider the architecture of Selenium 3, we can see the communication between Web Browser and Test Script is established through JSON Wire Protocol. Due to this additional code involved to achieve the goal. And more efforts are engaging for encode and decode the API request by using the w3c protocol.
This architecture has modified in Selenium 4. Also WebDriver in Selenium is updated with the W3C Standardization. In Selenium 4, JSON wire protocol is deprecated. To communicate from the Web Brower, Test script will directly ping the Web Browser. Earlier with JSON Wire Protocol, the information were communicating through http.
According to Simon Stewart, the creator of Selenium WebDriver, the reason of upgrading to Selenium 4 from Selenium 3 is the W3C WebDriver Protocol.
Deprecation of Opera & Phantom JS drivers
Addition to the JSON wire, Native support for Opera & Phantom JS also deprecated. You cannot test your test script against the Opera and Phantom JS in Selenium 4.
But why it is deprecated / removed?
This is because, in Selenium 4, WebDriver implementation for Opera and Phantom JS has removed or not available.
In worst case, if you want to test your test script against your Opera Browser then you need to use Chromium Browser. It will give the similar result as Opera Browser is based on Chromium Browser only.
In other hand, if you want to test your test script against your Phantom JS then you need to use Headless mode of Firefox and Chrome. It will give the similar result as Phantom JS.
Advantages of new Selenium 4 Architecture
The Architecture of Selenium 4 is one of the stable version of Selenium which supports cross browser testing with more stability than the earlier release of Selenium. There will be no compatibility issue will be there if someone will install / integrate the Selenium 4. All major Browser like Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari are compatible with Selenium 4.
The main advantage of this will be the more consistent while testing in different browsers.
Improved Documentation
The Documentation section in selenium has important role in a version. It will help user to understand the features of the build and how-to setup, how to work and some major functions which are needed to setup the application in your system.
In Selenium 4 version, Documentation is improved with neat and clean UI for navigating to each section. It explained all about the functions / features and APIs so that users will be able to know about the features, functionalities, advantages of the current version.
In Selenium 2, the documentation were not that clear and crispy. So that we had to rely on the outside tutorial, YouTube tutorials etc. to understand the features and APIs related to Selenium 2. But in Selenium 4, everything is mentioned in documentation. If we will go through the documentation fully then we may not need any other tutorials to understand the features and APIs of Selenium 4.
Summary
- WebDriver in Selenium is updated with the W3C Standardization.
- In Selenium to communicate from the Web Brower, Test script will directly ping the Web Browser.
- Before Selenium 4, with JSON Wire Protocol, the information were communicating through http.
- Improved documentation explained all about the functions / features and APIs so that users will be able to know about the features, functionalities, advantages of the current version.