In 2013, I remember reading an article in Selenium’s official site about the upcoming release of Selenium WebDriver 3, the next version to come, sometime around the end of the year. Since Selenium 2.53 was a significantly powerful version, it was unimaginable to me to experience anything that could over power it. But, I was still curious to see the changes they’ve come up with. So, news is that recently the awaited version has been released and it’s possible to finally download and start working with Selenium 3. Although it’s currently the beta version, it’s still good enough. At the moment, the third version is compatible with Java and Ruby.

After several tests and researches I have executed myself, here are my thoughts so far:

First thing first, if you’re working with Java and you have a version below 8 installed, you won’t be able to work with Selenium 3. Firefox’s driver support is still under Mozilla, but now the driver is outside the browser. This means that the path of the driver should be defined in code/global variables (exactly the same way we used to work with Chrome’s driver). Mozilla’s driver is geckodriver– which you’ll need to download. Apple took ownership and supports the web driver on safari’s 10.0 (at last, they acknowledged this project). Edge’s driver support is under Microsoft that wrote the Driver Server. There is no more support for Internet Explorer versions lower than 9 (also because of the fact that Microsoft itself stopped supporting them). No more support for the Selenium RC (does anyone still use it?) I executed different tests on a variety of browsers; the first thing I have to mention is that it does work. Meaning, regarding the backward compatibility, I didn’t experience any special problems. The test execution was performed on Windows 7 SP1 – 64 Bit:

Chrome browser (version 52, 64 Bit)

Firefox browser (version 0.1)

Safari browser (on Windows)

Internet Explorer browser (version 11)

Edge browser (Microsoft’s new browser)

A virtual browser – HTML Unit

The tests immediately called for Selenium’s API and I’ve also used Page Objects.

Like I said, I didn’t experience any issues with the backward compatibility.

To download the official Selenium 3 version from the official site, enter here: http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/

In case you’re looking for a guide to Create a Test Automation Framework with C#, Selenium Webdriver & NUnit, here’s a good one here.

I’m curious to know – what is your impression with Selenium WebDriver 3.0? Please share in the comments below.

Good luck, Yoni

Reference