W3C Webdriver…Selenium 4
By: Kishor Munot
Tags: Selenium 4, Selenium, Automation Testing, Software Development, Software Testing

Selenium 4

Many testers and developers who use Selenium WebDriver or Selenium Grid sometimes report some stability issues, some cases do not automatically work on all browsers, they need to be modified according to the browser’s needs. And this problem has been solved very well in Selenium 4.

What is Selenium 4.

The W3C standard will encourage compatibility across different software implementations of the WebDriver API and Selenium 4 is the new and highest upgraded version of web-driver who is coming with W3C standards. Earlier versions of selenium used JSON wire protocol to communicate with the various browsers. In Selenium 4, the whole JSON wire protocol is replaced by the W3C web-driver protocol and now they interacting with help of updated protocol.

Why do you need Selenium 4 or W3C protocol, in the past, you had to deal with errors like NoSuchElementException or ElementNotInteractableException, but since Selenium 4 has improved stability we don’t have to deal with these types of errors. Normally when two communicators speak a different language they have a slight error in speaking but when they speak the same language they communicate better with each other, and the same thing is happening in Selenium 4. All browsers were following W3C standards to communicate with other applications but were using the JSON wire protocol with the Selenium HTTPS request. Now, the W3C standard web-driver protocol has replaced the JSON wire protocol and this will make the interaction between the client request and the browser better.

W3C Webdriver protocol

Features of Selenium 4

Any browser vendor will now be able to easily plug into the new Selenium IDE. You can have your own locator strategy and plug in the Selenium IDE. The new CLI runner will also support parallel test case execution and will provide useful information like time taken and the number of test cases passed/failed. Node and Hub elements are upgraded and improved in the Selenium grid. Selenium 4 will come with a more user-friendly UI for Grid, with relevant information about sessions running, capacity, etc In selenium 4, we will get proper docker support and also introduced Actions APIs. You can access these developer tools by calling the methods in Selenium 4.

Action API : The user can press multiple keyboard buttons or even zoom in / out through Action API and handle complex drag and drop scenerio's efficiently.

In Selenium 4 they have added/removed some capabilities, they have deprecated or added some API/methods. Now, the interaction between selenium and appium has also improved as both are using the W3C standard protocol.

In Selenium 4 alpha version we can also get locators relative to any other locator.

toLeftOf(): Element located to the left of specified element.

toRightOf(): Element located to the right of the specified element.

above(): Element located above with respect to the specified element.

below(): Element located below with respect to the specified element.

near(): Element is at most 50 pixels far away from the specified element. The pixel value can be modified.

You can use selenium with new features and new locator techniques and don’t forget to check the compatibility between the driver and Selenium before using Selenium.

If the above information is helping you to understand Selenium 4 then please give some claps to the story and also share your feedback.

Thank you.