Big Changes in Selenium 4

Selenium 4 Alpha Download Available

If you are looking for Selenium 4 Alpha version, you can find it here.  While it is not recommended to use an Alpha version for full implementation, it will let you see what new changes are there and it will help you figure out what changes you will need to make moving forward and understand the benefits,

Selenium 4 Official Release Date

As of now, there hasn’t been an announcement on when Selenium 4 will officially be released.  Once we know that, we will provide the updated date.

Selenium 4 Changes

Here are some of the major changes that will happen in Selenium 4

1. W3C Selenium WebDriver standardization-The goal is to have Selenium WebDriver completely standardized.  There are other tools and products that use WebDriver so this is a must have.  Specifically mobile testing tools like Appium and iOS Driver heavily rely on it.  With the change coming in Selenium 4, the test will now be able to directly communicate without using API encoding/decoding using the W3C protocol.
2. Selenium IDE Support for Chrome-There will be much more advanced capabilities with the new update.  There will be a completely new way using a new plug-in to Selenium 4.  There will also be a new CLI Runner that will leverage NodeJS and have the following capabilities:
   • WebDriver playback
   • Parallel execution
3. Improved Selenium Grid-While Selenium Grid is very powerful in that it allows tests to run in parallel, it is very difficult to initially setup and configure.  In Selenium Grid, the hub acts like a server and it controls which tests are run.  The node are the test machines where the Selenium test scripts are run.  With Selenium 4, there will be improved changes related to the hub.
4. Improved Selenium Grid UI-Selenium 4 will have an improved user experince with a much richer UI.
5. Improved Debugging/Logging capability-It is important for the automated engineers to have as much detail as possible when it comes to logging and debugging of issues.  Selenium 4 promises to provide that in order to accelerate resolution of script issues.
6. Selenium 4 Documentation– The documentation hasn’t been updated since Selenium 2.0.  Documentation is critical and it is important that it is updated so that automated test engineers will not have to wonder how to use Selenium 4.

I hope this information has been helpful.  I will be thrilled to see the new Selenium 4 version when it is officially released.  For now, you can download Selenium 4 Alpha version from the link provided above.  Once the official version is released, you will be able to download it from the SeleniumHQ website.