Selenium Overview – Selenium IDE, Selenium RC, Selenium WebDriver and Selenium Grid
In this article, we will learn what is Selenium and the following in detail.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open source (free) automated testing suite to test web applications. In the testing space we use Selenium for automating web applications.
Selenium is one of the popular test automation tools in the market. It supports different platforms and browsers.
Selenium is a set of different software tools. Each tool has a different approach in supporting web based automation testing.
It has four components namely,
- Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
- Selenium RC (Remote Control)
- Selenium WebDriver
- Selenium Grid
It is first launched in 2004 as Selenium Core. In 2007, Selenium IDE & Selenium WebDriver are added. Later on, Selenium tools were named Selenium 2(2011), Selenium 3(2016). Now Selenium is coming as Selenium 4.0.Â
It has gained a lot of popularity in terms of web-based automated testing and giving a great competition to the famous commercial tool HP QTP (Quick Test Professional) AKA UFT (Unified Functional Testing).
QTP/UFT is a famous automation tool and it was originally developed by Mercury Interactive before HP acquired it. Selenium is used as an antidote in the treatment of mercury intoxication. Jason Huggins (An engineer at ThoughtWorks – the one who introduced Selenium tool) suggested the name of this automation tool as Selenium.
What is Selenium IDE?
Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a Firefox plugin. It is the simplest framework in the Selenium Suite. It allows us to record and playback the scripts. Even though we can create scripts using Selenium IDE, we need to use Selenium RC or Selenium WebDriver to write more advanced and robust test cases.
Operation System Support – Windows, Mac OS, Linux
Browser Support – Mozilla Firefox
What is Selenium RC?
Selenium RC AKA Selenium 1. Selenium RC was the main Selenium project for a long time before the WebDriver merge brought up Selenium 2. Selenium 1 is still actively supported (in maintenance mode). It relies on JavaScript for automation. It supports Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#. It supports almost every browser out there.
Operation System Support – Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris
Browser Support – Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera
What is Selenium WebDriver?
Selenium WebDriver AKA Selenium 2 is a browser automation framework that accepts commands and sends them to a browser. It is implemented through a browser-specific driver. It controls the browser by directly communicating with it. Selenium WebDriver supports Java, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby.
Operation System Support – Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris
Browser Support – Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome 12.0.712.0 and above, Safari, Opera 11.5 and above, Android, iOS, HtmlUnit 2.9 and above
How to Install Selenium WebDriver
What is Selenium Grid?
Selenium Grid is a tool used together with Selenium RC to run tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel. That is, running multiple tests at the same time against different machines running different browsers and operating systems.
Conclusion
In this article, we have covered what is Selenium and components of Selenium such as Selenium IDE, Selenium RC, Selenium WebDriver and Selenium Grid. You can go through the complete Selenium Tutorial to learn in depth about this tool.
What Next?
- Selenium Alternatives
- Selenium WebDriver Interview Questions
- Manual Testing Interview Questions
- Cypress Interview Questions
- Playwright Interview Questions
- Selenium vs Cypress
- Selenium vs Playwright
- Selenium vs Puppeteer
- Selenium vs Katalon
- Manual Testing vs Automation Testing
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