Overview

What is Selenium:-

Selenium is one of the most widely used Open Source Web UI(User Interface) automation testing suite.Selenium supports automation across different browsers,platforms and programming languages.

Selenium supports a variety of programming languages ,Browsers & Platforms as mentioned below :-

Programming Languages :- C#, Java , Perl , PHP , Python and Ruby

Operating System:- Windows,Linux,Solaris and Macintosh

Browsers:- Internet Explorer,Mozilla Firefox,Google Chrome and Safari

                                                           

              

 


History of Selenium:-

• It was developed in 2004 by Jason Huggins as a JavaScript library used to automate his manual testing routines.

• Simon Stewart at Thought Works had been working on different web testing tool called WebDriver. It did not rely on JavaScript  to do the heavy lifting,but instead had a client for each browser that was coded from scratch.It also had a 'higher level' API than Selenium-RC and showed lots of promise.Simon presented the tool at GTAC ,and started work on compatibility with Selenium-RC,which gave rise to the obvious conclusion that the two projects should merge.Simon,at Google from 2007 to 2012,and now at Facebook,gets to spend some of his time making that a reality.

                                                                                                                            

Simon Stewart

Jason Huggins

Key Comparison:-

Below are some key factors to consider Selenium for the Test Automation:-

• Open Source Availability
• Multi-Browser Support
• Support Across Various Operating System
• Multi language Support
• Easy to learn and use 

Comparison with Cypress:-

Pros & Cons of using Selenium for Test Automation:-

Pros

• It is open source tool anyone can download & use
• It supports various operating environments(Windows,Linux,Mac etc..)
• It supports various programming languages to create and execute Tests
• It supports all popular web browsers
• It supports parallel test execution
• It uses less Hardware resources as compare to other popular tools like QTP/UFT

Cons

• Since it is an open source tool,No reliable Technical support(Official Users Group,Chat room in seleniumq.org)
• It doesn't support Desktop Applications/Windows bases applications
• No other tool integration for Test Management
• Difficult to use as compare to other tools like QTP/UFT
• New features may not work properly
• Deployment of selenium is manual and thus more difficult than the UI tools like UFT/RFT