What is Selenium 4? The latest in Automated Browser Testing

• Admin
• 24 Feb 21

Simon Stewart revolutionized the testing domain with the introduction of Selenium software which is one of the most remarkable and popular open-source automation software in the industry. The announcement of the Selenium 4 release date created a lot of buzz and enthusiasm surged up to know about the features of the latest Selenium release. However, the release of the latest version of Selenium got delayed but definitely, it was worth the wait as the Alpha version of Selenium 4 had all the features it claimed to have.

Features of Selenium 4
– Selenium WebDriver updates
A decent number of methods, classes, and driver’s interfaces have been removed and replaced with better ones which are listed in the official documentation. However, backward compatibility with legacy versions is assured which enables you to deploy the latest version in your older tests and they would work just fine.

– Selenium 4 has an improved grid
Selenium 4 helps you bid goodbye to configuration and installation challenges and empowers you to execute multiple tests at the same time on multiple browsers, systems, and operating systems. One of the major upgrades in Selenium 4 is that connecting the hub with the node is easier than it was in Selenium 3 as Selenium 4 acts as the hub as well as the node right after you start it. The latest version has canceled out thread-safety bugs and offers enhanced Docker support.
– Enhanced Selenium 4 IDE
Earlier Selenium IDE didn’t please the automation testing engineers as it had only limited features and one of the setbacks was that it was only available as a Firefox extension. In the latest version, Selenium IDE supports different browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Selenium IDE has a control flow mechanism with which one can produce efficient and improved tests. In Selenium 4, Selenium IDE is empowered with a SIDE tool called Selenium IDE runner which enables the tester to run a .side project on the Node.js platform. The specialty of SIDE runner is that it can cross-browser tests in parallel.

– W3C compliance of WebDriver API

SeleniumOne of the major changes in Selenium 4 is that it is W3C compliance of WebDriver API which enables you to implement across different software without setbacks in terms of compatibility. In Selenium 3, the browser communication took place through JSON wire protocol which required API encoding and decoding. Selenium 4 makes it easier for you by discarding the need for API encoding and decoding by using the W3C protocol. WebDriver in Selenium 4 can directly communicate with the browser as all the major browsers follow the W3C protocol.

– Relative locators

One of the setbacks in the Selenium 3 that has been overcome in the latest version – Selenium 4 is bringing relative locators on board which would help in locating WebElements easily based on the visual location in comparison to DOM elements.
The features of the new Selenium 4 Alpha version are exciting as it is power-packed with unlimited features that accelerate the testing process.