Selenium – status

Blog: Announcing Selenium 4

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s with very great pleasure that we are announcing the release of Selenium 4. This is available for Java, .Net, Python, Ruby, and Javascript. You can download it from your favourite package manager or right from GitHub!

If you’re already a Selenium user, this update should be as easy as just changing your dependency from 3.x to 4.0.0. We’ve worked hard to ensure that this is a “drop-in” upgrade, having focused on keeping the public APIs as stable as possible.

Of course, we’ve made changes, so if you relied on code that was marked as internal to Selenium, or that was deprecated, you might experience some hiccups. Please check our documentation for advice on how to deal with each of the common problems we’re aware of.

But there’s more to Selenium 4 than just being a stable release of what was there before! It brings a whole host of new and exciting features that we hope will make your tests more fun to write, and more stable when you run them. Let’s take a look at some of them!

We’ve introduced “relative locators”. These allow you to specify where on the page an element can be found using language that people use too; things like “above that element”, or “to the right of this other element”. This will hopefully provide you all with a tool to fight against incredibly complex locators, making your tests read a little more clearly, and being more resilient to changes in the page’s DOM. We’re not the first ones to come up with this idea – that honour belongs to Sahi – but if you’ve not used them before, we hope you like them!

If you’re using Firefox or a browser that is derived from Chromium, we’ve added a slew of new capabilities too. These include ways of handling “basic” and “digest” authentication, Network Interception (Are you an HTTP 418?), and also performing commonly requested tasks, like waiting for a change in the DOM, or providing a way to look at Javascript errors.

We’ve added these new features in a way that fits in with our existing APIs. There’s no need to rewrite your tests: just use the new features when it feels right to you.

We have also rebuilt the Selenium Grid, taking lessons from successful projects such as Zalenium and Selenoid to enhance the capabilities. This new Grid runs just as well as a single process, running on a single machine, as it does in the traditional “hub and node” configuration, but it also supports a fully-distributed mode, for use in modern infrastructure running Kubernetes. It has better security baked-in, because we know that securing a Grid can be a difficult task. And at all of these scales and sizes, all the new features we’ve added to the language bindings will work as expected.

The Grid can also manage Docker containers on your local machine, pulling images such as the standalone firefox server so your infrastructure maintenance becomes just a little bit less taxing.

Finally, the Grid is easier to manage. We’ve revamped the UI, placing it on top of a GraphQL model that anyone is free to query and make use of to create their own visualisations or monitors of the Grid. If you’d like to peek into a running session, there are live VNC previews you can open and interact with, providing even better insight into what’s been going on. And if you want even more information, we’ve integrated support for OpenTelemetry into the Grid, so now you can find out exactly what’s happening, where, and when.

I know it’s a cliche to say that it’s a “very great pleasure”, but, being honest with you, it genuinely is. Working on this new version of Selenium has been a chance to work with some amazing engineers, and to be part of a vibrant and energetic community. It’s been a lot of fun to write this code, with these people, and it feels right to say “thank you” to as many of them as possible here. So, without waiting any longer….

We would like to thank all of our users who have helped Selenium be successful over the years. Without you we wouldn’t be where we are today. We would also like to thank all the contributors who have submitted Pull Requests, your contributions make Selenium better. For everyone who’s taken the time to file an issue, and to let us know where there’s been a problem: thank you. We only have a chance to improve when we know that there’s something that needs work!

And finally, thank you to all the Selenium Committers, BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, and our Selenium-Level sponsors for getting this release ready for our users.

We hope you enjoy Selenium 4, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it!

Blog: Selenium 4 Release Candidate 2

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve listeneed and responded to the feedback from the first release candidate of Selenium 4, and we’re now happy to announce the second release candidate of Selenium 4. This is shipping for .Net, Java, Python, Ruby, and Javascript, and it’s available from all the popular package managers. Go! Try it out!

Unless we encounter a very serious issue or bug, this is likely to be the last release before we push Selenium 4.0.0 itself. What does this mean for you? It’s your last chance to try it on for size and let us know if there are any problems.

In this release, we’ve fixed a nasty issue where closing the first window would cause CDP-related features to break, and have landed a few other cleanups and fixes.

If you’re a Firefox user, please make sure you’re using the very latest version of the geckodriver If you don’t, there may be problems starting sessions as we rely on new features that are included in this new geckodriver release.

If you’re new Selenium 4, then you may want to read this blog post, which explains more, but you might want to have a look at:

Relative locators, which provide a way of finding elements by where they are in relation to one another (like “above”, or “to the right of”)
Authentication on websites using basic or digest authentication
Network interception, which provides an easy easy way to capture and modify HTTP traffic from the browser, as well as making it possible to get HTTP status codes.

Thank you to everyone in the community who’s given us so much helpful and thoughtful feedback on the first release candidate. We really hope that you enjoy this release candidate too!

#Selenium 4 RC 2 has been tagged! This is the final RC before we do our final release! Go start using it! Details of each of the bindings will be found in the thread below!
— David @automatedtester@mastodon.social (@AutomatedTester) September 30, 2021

#Selenium 4.0 RC2 .NET bindings have been released! This will likely be the last release before 4.0 stable release, and the last chance to fix issues before then, so go try it out now. Get the bindings at https://t.co/wGImsWFfCK or via #NuGet.
— Jim Evans (@jimevansmusic) September 30, 2021

#Selenium 4.0.0.rc2 #ruby gem has been published. All of the less pleasant work went into this one - polishing and making sure things match up between the different bindings, etc. This should essentially be Selenium 4, so upgrade already and tell us what you think!
— Titus Fortner (@titusfortner) September 30, 2021

Exciting times! Selenium 4.0 RC2 for Java has been released. We're planning on this being the last release before the stable 4.0 release, so this is your last chance for you to give us feedback and for us to react before then! #selenium4
— Simon Mavi Stewart (@shs96c) September 30, 2021

Blog: Selenium 4 Release Candidate

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re very happy to announce the first release candidate of Selenium 4. We’re shipping this for .Net, Java, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, so if you’re using any of those languages, go and grab it from your package manager of choice!

This release is the result of a lot of work by the Selenium team project, but most importantly, all the Selenium community who tried our beta releases, and gave us great and valuable feedback.

#Selenium 4 Release Candidate for #ruby is now available! There should be fewer problems running against latest versions of browsers now than with Selenium 3. Please update and let us know of any problems so we can get the production release out the door. https://t.co/JWbwDRPcj4
— Titus Fortner (@titusfortner) September 1, 2021

So, big news: #Selenium 4.0 RC1 has just been released! The .NET bindings are available via #NuGet, or you can find them at our new binary release point, https://t.co/CSNK7K47ue. We're closing in on a final, stable 4.0 release, so if you haven't tried it before now, you should!
— Jim Evans (@jimevansmusic) September 1, 2021

#Selenium 4 RC1 is out! The #python bindings are available at https://t.co/B4zKI6JQkA pic.twitter.com/kMlDM4ad7I
— David @automatedtester@mastodon.social (@AutomatedTester) September 2, 2021

Hurrah! #selenium4 RC1 is out, and the Java bindings have been released! Grab them from your favourite maven repo, or download the binaries from https://t.co/XUcv7RzbzL pic.twitter.com/E9T1ZTZ9jd
— Simon Mavi Stewart (@shs96c) September 2, 2021

@SeleniumHQ 4 RC 1 is out! This means that Selenium 4 is getting closer and closer 🎉🎉
Try out the new Grid through our @docker images -> https://t.co/lGUrZAQneJ pic.twitter.com/BzZxPn3p0y
— Diego Molina (@diegofmolina) September 6, 2021

One thing you may want to do to get ready for the update (which you can do before updating the dependency itself!) is to update the drivers you need. In particular, please update geckodriver to 0.29.1 or later.

Most of the new features in Selenium 4 are mentioned in this blog entry, but the main highlights are:

Relative locators, for finding elements using terms that make sense to us humans.
The ability to intercept network traffic
Authentication with basic or digest authentication.

If this sounds interesting, please download the release candidate from your favourite package manager (maven, nuget, npm, pip, or the gem), or directly from the Selenium site.

Blog: Selenium 4 Beta 1 Released

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re very happy to announce the release of the first beta of Selenium 4. We’re shipping this for Java, .Net, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, so if you’re using any of those languages, go and grab it from your package manager of choice!

This has been the culmination of a lot of work by so many people, not only the project TLC, but also of literally hundreds of people: 205 since we released Selenium 3.141.59, at the last count. A big thank you to everybody who’s helped make this possible!

So, what’s changed since Selenium 3? The answer is both “not much” and also “almost everything”.

By “not much”, I mean that if your tests are working with Selenium 3 right now, you should be able to just upgrade your dependency to Selenium 4. You will find that things that were marked “deprecated” are now gone, but the advantage of the long time between the last Selenium 3 release and this is that you’ve had plenty of time to try and find alternatives.

If this doesn’t work, please let us know! We’ve worked hard to ensure compatibility between the releases, but it’s possible we may have missed some things.

By “almost everything”, I mean that under the covers there have been substantial changes. We’ve rewritten the Selenium server to allow it to work not only in the familiar “standalone” and “hub and node” modes, but also in a new “distributed” mode, which makes it signifcantly easier to deploy to something such as Kubernetes in a way that scales well.

The new server is also wired up with support for OpenTelemetry and exposes a GraphQL endpoint, so that figuring what’s going on in the Grid, and tracking down what’s gone wrong if something happens, is easier than ever.

Not all the changes are server-side. We recently wrote about the new features in Selenium 4 that you can use in your tests, but some of the main highlights are:

Relative locators, for finding elements using terms that make sense to us humans.
The ability to intercept network traffic
Authentication with basic or digest authentication.

We’ll be telling you more about these features in later blog posts, and as we improve our documentation.

If this sounds interesting, please download the beta from your favourite package manager (maven, nuget, npm, pip, or the gem), or directly from the Selenium site.

Blog: The Current Status of Selenium 1 and Selenium 2

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In the beginning there was Se1, and it was good. But it could have been better — in ways that WebDriver was starting to be good at. Thus the brilliant idea was hatched to merge the two projects.

And then the confusion began. Let’s see if I can start to address some of it via a ficticious conversation that consolidates the Se-user list and #selenium irc channel.

There are a couple annoying bugs in Se-RC 1.03; when is the 1.0.4 release?

Se-RC 1.0.4 is planned for sometime towards the end of July 2010

I’ve heard rumours that 1.0.4 the to be the final release?

Yes. 1.0.4 is planned on being the final 1.x release

That’s crazy talk! I can’t use a .0 or ‘alpha’ release for my mission critical application

Actually, its not all that crazy — and needs a bit more explanation. Se2 is truly a merger of the two projects, in fact 2.0a1 was literally the Se code from the OpenQA repository and the WebDriver code its Google Code repository merged into a new one. This meant that from the first release of the 2.x series, it has contained 100% of the 1.x code which means 100% backwards compatibility. Later releases in the 2.x series have been driven primarily by evolutions of the code that came from WebDriver, not from Se 1.x.

OK, so 100% of Se 1.x is in 2.x; I get that. But how are you making sure that fixes to one get into the other?

Here is another ‘secret’ — don’t tell anyone, but there hasn’t been any pure 1.x development since the merging of the codebases. Every 1.x release since the merger has really been a 2.x release — but all packaged up to make it look like a 1.x release. This is why observant people have noticed a log message that looks something like 11:09:37.507 INFO – v2.0 [a4], with Core v2.0 [a4] when they start up their 1.x server.

So you’ve been releasing alpha code disguised as a stable release? Jerks!

Woah! Relax! Recall what I said above about it being backwards compatible by default. The ‘alpha’ tag is there because the API for the new code is still being developed and features flushed out. The 1.x code is however, still stable and still production quality.

Alright, I take back calling you folks jerks, but I really don’t like the alpha tag. When will it be out of ‘alpha’?

There is only one or two more features to implement (like handling alerts) in the WebDriver code and some cleanup before the betas start. But hope for a 2.0.0 final by the end of the year. And while we’re on the topic of ‘alpha’ vs. ‘beta’, this the team’s working definitions of each.

Alpha – APIs can, and likely will change. Possibly in dramatic ways.
Beta – With the APIs set, make sure they work with the major browsers

‘Major Browsers’ eh, what exactly does that mean?

Right now it means Firefox, Internet Explorer and at least one WebKit based one (Safari or Chrome)

In short… it is a requirement of Se2 that the server be backwards compatible with Se-RC 1.x and that has already been accomplished by building the code from a common source repository. This means that if you are using Se-RC, you can switch out the server for a 2.x one and have no impact on the execution of the scripts. Plus you can start to experiment with the new stuff that came over from WebDriver.