What’s new In Selenium 4.0 & the impact on previous versions

1. what's Selenium 4.0?

Selenium 4 is that the latest version of selenium; Simon Stewart founding father of selenium has announced Selenium 4 at the Selenium online training Conference in Bangalore which consists of few major updates and its planned to release after October 2019 (even though official announcement yet to get). Let’s understand the few things about Selenium 4.

2. Features of Selenium 4.0?

2.1. WebDriver became W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standardization

The change with Selenium 4 is that the standardizing the WebDriver as per the W3C standards. W3C standards encourage compatibility across different software implementations of the WebDriver API and make the Framework far more stable & reduce compatibility issues across different Web Browsers.

A test in Selenium 3 communicates with the browser at the top node through the JSON wire protocol. Testing tools like Appium and iOS Driver which are associated with mobile testing heavily believe JSON wire protocol. With Selenium 4 adapting W3C Protocol for communication between the driving force and browser, Tests will now be ready to directly communicate the browser without using API encoding/decoding. which might help in mobile testing users

2.2. Improved Selenium Grid – The Selenium Grid code has been modified with many changes and needed improvements; the console of the selenium grid has been restructured. It allows you to execute test cases in parallel on multiple browsers and systems also as operating systems.

The UI for Selenium Grid is now with a more user-friendly UI that might have all the relevant information about the sessions running, capacity, etc.

And also, Basic support for utilizing Ducker Containers with new Grid Server is been added.

2.3. Support for browsers – Native support for Opera and PhantomJS going forward are going to be removed. Whereas users who want to check Opera can opt Chrome since Opera is predicated on Chromium and for PhantomJS users can use Chrome or Firefox in headless mode. And Selenium Server now not includes Lunchtime by default.

2.4. New Selenium 4 IDE (Chrome & Firefox) – Selenium IDE may be a record and playback tool is now available with more advanced capabilities and features.

New plug-in: The remake plugin will allow you to run Selenium on any browser vendor and may declare our own locator strategy.

New CLI runner: The new CLI runner is totally supported node.js rather than old HTML-based runner and can have capabilities like WebDriver Playback and Parallel Execution to support for parallel execution and supply reports like passed and failed tests. The new Selenium IDE runner is totally supported WebDriver.

2.5. Detailed Documentation – Selenium users face difficulties as there's no proper updated documentation of Selenium, Selenium HQ promises to deliver us update documentation along side the 4.0 version.

2.6. Better Analysis – Logging and debugging details are going to be improved to accelerate the resolution of script issues for testers.

3. Impacts of Selenium 4.0?

In addition to those new capabilities, arriving of Selenium 4 may require few changes in your existing selenium 2.X/3.X tests, Let’s check out those areas of your tests that need to be updated with Selenium 4

The getPosition & get Size methods were replaced by retract method and therefore the setPosition & set Size methods were replaced by secrete method.

Now you'll configure the situation of your Safari driver using the “webdriver.safari.driver” system property.

Element screenshot ting is feasible in Selenium 4.

Fullscreen and minimize methods are added, in order that the driving force window can now be full screen or minimized and every one window manipulation commands are now supported.

Added driver.switchTo().parentFrame() – we will use it to travel from the kid frame to the parent frame directly.

Changes added to Chrome driver –

sendDevToolsCommand() – The sendDevToolsCommand() method sends an arbitrary dev tools command to the browser and returns a promise which will be resolved when the command has finished.

setDownloadPath() – The setDownloadPath() method sends a DevTools command to vary Chrome’s download directory and returns a promise which will be resolved when the command has finished.

Changes to Firefox driver – Added installation(path) method to put in a replacement addon within the present session. This function will return an “id” which will be wont to uninstall the addon using uninstallAddon() method.

Options class now extends Capabilities class for Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari.

Changes wrt to Errors like Added Element Click Intercepted Error, Insecure Certificate Error & Removed Element Not Visible Error

Removed the firefox. profile class. All its functionality is now provided directly by firefox. options.

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