Introduction to Selenium Core

Overview

Selenium Core is an open-source tool for testing web applications. Selenium Core tests run directly in a web browser, just like users browse web applications. The tool is written in JavaScript/ dynamic HTML and was developed at ThoughtWorks.

Note that: The tool is deprecated now with the new WebDriver API that interacts with the web browsers natively.

Selenium Core

Selenium Core uses JavaScript and IFrames to embed a test engine in the web browser. The tool will work with any JavaScript-enabled browser. We should copy Selenium Core tests directly into the application web server, allowing the tests to run in the browser on the client side. The major drawback of the tool is that we need to have privileges to write to the application server machine to install the tool.

Browser Compatibility

Selenium Core is cross-platform and supports many web browsers and operating system platforms.

Different browsers handle JavaScript somewhat differently, the tool tweaks the engine to support a wide range of browsers on different operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Selenium Core tests run on:

Windows

Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer
Opera

Linux

Firefox
Konqueror
Opera

macOS

Safari
Firefox

Tool Usage

The tool is used for web functional testing, acceptance testing, and browser compatibility testing.

Drawback

The main drawback to using Selenium Core is that we need to make it available or install it on the same web server as the application that we want to test. This is because Selenium Core is pure JavaScript, and so it is bound to security restrictions. JavaScript enforces some security requirements like the Same Origin Policy.

If we can’t modify the webserver that we want to test, Selenium Core may not be the right tool. Some alternative is to use Selenium IDE/ RC or Selenium Webdriver API.

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