Selenium 3.0 Beta is here and it takes a leap!!

When Selenium 2.0 was released in July 2011, it was a major leap from Selenium 1.0 (or Selenium Remote Control “RC”). It was the merger of RC and WebDriver projects and as we saw it was just the name Selenium that was retained and pretty much everything was updated to WebDriver API. Also, that release came with the announcement that the support to RC would be “soon” dropped. And then we heard the similar announcements in various Selenium conferences that RC will be dropped that year, it did’t happen though. I presume that was due to large number legacy RC user base out there. For the last six years users were advised to switch to the newer WebDriver APIs and to stop using the original RC APIs.

Now that day has at last come when the RC support has been completely dropped in Selenium 3.0.

Selenium 3 is Selenium 2 without Selenium 1.

Other major changes is for the Firefox driver.  So far Selenium has been giving preferred treatment to Firefox, there was no need to use any browser drivers like for Google Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari (previously).  Firefox always ran right out of the box, not anymore…  We now need to use Geckodriver to run Firefox marionette implementation.

Other than this there are some major changes that you should be aware of as below:

• You’ll need to be running Java 8 to use the Java pieces of Selenium. Get it here
• Support for Firefox is via Mozilla’s geckodriver. Get it here
• Support for Safari is provided on macOS (Sierra or later) via Apple’s own safaridriver. Get ithere
• Support for Edge is provided by Microsoft through their webdriver server. Get it here
• Only versions 9 or above of IE are supported. Earlier versions may work, but are no longer supported as Microsoft no longer supports them. Remember you need to have thesesettings for IE.

Our team has been doing testing of the Selenium 3.0 beta and found inconsistencies with Firefox 49 beta version, it works find on previous versions for Firefox.  I presume this might be the same old Selenium catching up with latest version of Firefox browser.  It might be good idea to stay with one version below the latest Firefox and keep latest Selenium Jar files.

We also plan to make a big announcement on this occasion which is related to CP-SAT and CP-SAT Advanced certification roadmap and all the testers out there who want to become expect in Selenium.  Please watch out this space for more.

Note: Originally published on ATA Blog --> http://agiletestingalliance.org/agileBlogs/selenium-3-0-beta-takes-leap/