What’s new in Selenium 3.0

Selenium 3.0 is on its way. Currently in its beta release, expected to be launched soon. So, what’s new in Selenium 3.0? As per official selenium website, beta 4 is supposed to be the last beta release before the final official release of selenium 3.0.

Learn Selenium Automation Testing from Expert Testers

Selenium 1.0 to Selenium 2.0

Selenium 2.0, more popularly known as Selenium web driver API made Selenium the automation testing framework of choice. Pre-Selenium 2.0, HP QTP was the leading automation testing choice. But selenium web driver changed all that and now it’s a tool of choice for automation testing.

Selenium 2.0 maintained two core components – Selenium Core and Web driver APIs working together. But it got rid of Selenium RC server and injecting code into your pages to automate testing. Web Driver APIs made it simpler to write automation scripts for any browser by simply using the appropriate driver for any browser.

Selenium 3.0 – Core Changes

Selenium Core is gone

With the release of Selenium 3.0, there is no selenium core. Selenium 2 supported selenium core for backward compatibility. There is no selenium core in version 3.0. Selenium official blog states that

Over time, the needs of modern web testing have grown ever more complicated and sophisticated, and Selenium Core is now less capable of meeting these needs than it was before.

This means that if you or your company is using Selenium core, you need to migrate your code.

Selenium IDE exported script

If you use selenium IDE to write code and export it in table format for execution purposes, you need to use a new test runner. Selenium Html Runner can be used for this purpose and is available in the download section of Selenium official website.

Gecko Driver for Mozilla

Though completely independent of Selenium 3.0 release, Mozilla is making structural changes to the its Firefox driver. Firefox versions prior to version 48, had web driver integrated and you didn’t need to provide the path of the webdriver executable. However with Firefox 48 and beyond, this has changed. Just like Internet Explorer / Edge or Chrome browser, you need to now provide the path of Firefox gecko driver executable.

This is nothing to do with selenium 3 but with Mozilla. So even if you are using Selenium 2.0, you will need to invoke gecko driver with Firefox 48 and above.

Gecko Driver Location

In the next few articles, we will be writing a few examples to demonstrate the selenium 3.0 new features

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