Today I want to make a big announcement that I just heard from Simon Stewart. If you don’t know Simon, he’s the main contributor to Selenium, and he just announced that Selenium 3.0 is officially released. This is huge. I went to the Selenium conference in Boston in 2013 when they announced that Selenium 3 would be released by December. Two or three Christmases went by, and no Selenium 3, so this is a huge huge announcement in regards to the effort that the team put in to get Selenium 3 out the door.
If you head on over to seleniumhq.com, you’ll see that the language bindings are starting to be updated with Selenium 3. They’ve had Selenium, the beta version, available for the past few months, but the official version was just announced and released today. You want to check that out, seleniumhq.com.
What you need to know about Selenium 3
If your wondering, “Now what has this do with me? I use Selenium, what do I have to be worried about?” Really, I’ll be honest. If you’ve just been using the WebDriver API and your framework’s based on the WebDriver API, you’re all set. There’s nothing really you need to do. You just import Selenium 3 and it really should be a seamless integration for you with hardly any hiccups. Really, it’s the people that still use Selenium RC that are going to have an issue. If you’re using WebDriver API and you’ve been using it all along, really it should be a seamless upgrade for you. I think the only thing you need to look out for is if you’re using Selenium Grid. There are some configuration and parameter changes that are in place, but even that is pretty easy.
Selenium RC is Officially Dead – Long Live WebDriver
Big announcement, it’s a big announcement. Whether or not it’s going to affect you that much, probably not unless, like I said, if you’re using WebDriver API you should be all set. If you’re still using Selenium RC, what they’ve done with Selenium 3, is they’ve pulled out all the Selenium core implementations. They pulled out all of Selenium RC and they’re replacing it with WebDriver compatible components. If you’re using Selenium RC, it’s a … It shouldn’t be a surprise. They’ve been warning us for years that Selenium RC is going away, but today is the day that it’s gone. Like I said, if you go to the seleniumhq page, it’s not even available for download anymore.
If you’re using Selenium RC, you want to move over as soon as possible. This will have a big impact on you. As I said, it shouldn’t be a big surprise, this is something that they’ve announced for a while. Also, like I said, based on Simon Stewart’s latest e-mail – that’s how I found out that Selenium 3 was released – really the biggest changes are a lot of bug fixes. If you’re using WebDriver you should not be impacted that much. I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people I work with. “Hey, should we go to Selenium 3?” Everyone’s really excited about Selenium 3, it’s a huge huge change. In terms of impact to you as a Selenium engineer, if you’re using WebDriver API it really should be seamless and not that big of a deal.
Selenium W3c Standard
Like I said, what they’ve done with Selenium 3, looks like they’re just really cleaning things up. I think they’re moving towards Selenium 4, where they’re really going to try to implement the W3C standard that they’ve been working with to making it an official WebDriver standard that everyone will follow. Once that happens, it’s kind of cool because all the browsers now will be responsible for implementing their own Selenium implementations, and they’ll stop owning it. It’s really a huge thing that they’re moving towards.
Like I said, it may not seem like a big deal, but this is a huge huge effort by the Selenium team. The Selenium team, it’s all open source. These people are not paid. They spend their nights and weekends working on adding bug fixes, debugging Selenium. It’s a huge effort. A big thank you and kudos to anyone involved with Selenium, especially the Selenium 3 push to get it live.
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Joe Colantonio is the founder of TestGuild, an industry-leading platform for automation testing and software testing tools. With over 25 years of hands-on experience, he has worked with top enterprise companies, helped develop early test automation tools and frameworks, and runs the largest online automation testing conference, Automation Guild.
Joe is also the author of Automation Awesomeness: 260 Actionable Affirmations To Improve Your QA & Automation Testing Skills and the host of the TestGuild podcast, which he has released weekly since 2014, making it the longest-running podcast dedicated to automation testing. Over the years, he has interviewed top thought leaders in DevOps, AI-driven test automation, and software quality, shaping the conversation in the industry.
With a reach of over 400,000 across his YouTube channel, LinkedIn, email list, and other social channels, Joe’s insights impact thousands of testers and engineers worldwide.
He has worked with some of the top companies in software testing and automation, including Tricentis, Keysight, Applitools, and BrowserStack, as sponsors and partners, helping them connect with the right audience in the automation testing space.
Follow him on LinkedIn or check out more at TestGuild.com.
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