Introduction
There are several features in Selenium that make it a popular automation API for testing Web applications. Some of the Selenium features are as follows:
Open Source
The source code of the Selenium APIs is available at the GitHub repository. We can understand the code and modify and extend it according to the needs.
Selenium Ecosystem
Selenium’s ecosystem is large. Many third-party vendors have created tools and frameworks to support Selenium testing. Selenium also has many Sponsors to support the Selenium Project.
Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs, and frameworks.
You can use Selenium If we want to
- Create robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests.
- Scale and distribute scripts across many test environments
Webdriver is a collection of language-specific bindings to drive a browser. Selenium WebDriver is the successor of Selenium Remote Control which has been officially deprecated now.
Multiple Browser Support
Selenium supports multiple browsers for Web automation testing. It supports all the widely used browsers that are used for browsing web applications. Selenium ecosystem provides us the drivers for each of the browsers for the tests.
- Google Chrome.
- Mozilla Firefox.
- Internet Explorer/ Edge.
- Safari.
- Opera.
Multiple OS support
Selenium works with multiple Operating System platforms like:
- Windows
- Linux
- MacOS
Language Bindings
We can create Webdriver scripts in multiple languages. We need to make use of specific language client drivers. The main languages supported are:
- Java
- Javascript
- Ruby
- Python
- C#
Parallel Testing
Selenium server a.k.a Grid allows us to run multiple tests in parallel on remote WebDriver instances on other machines, as well as on Cloud platforms. This reduces the overall testing time.