In the first of dedicated posts from him and his team, Stefan Untereichner looks at ways of getting productive with Selenium and overcome some of its limitations.
Today’s market offers many different tools for testing web applications, and Selenium is arguably the most popular open source project for automating browsers. But Selenium requires technical knowledge to get started and as we’ll see over the next few months, even testers who are not necessarily Selenium ninjas can get productive with Selenium and the help of our functional testing solution without spending unnecessary time, effort and money. But first, we’ll look at Selenium in the most general sense.
New to Selenium?
The core of Selenium is the WebDriver protocol, which interacts with the browser. Since March, 30th 2017 the WebDriver protocol has become a W3C candidate recommendation, which takes the browser vendors in the duty to provide the WebDriver implementation. The tests can then be written in various languages that communicate via the WebDriver protocol with the browser of choice. That’s it, Selenium automates browsers. For recording, writing, debugging and resulting you have to rely on other tools.
The functional testing team at Micro Focus has dedicated time and resources in augmenting Selenium and overcome certain limitations with value-added features.
Check out our guide
Our posts will look at the differences between pure Selenium, Micro Focus Silk WebDriver – our free record and replay solution for Selenium – and Micro Focus Silk Test, our powerful functional testing solution for web, mobile, desktop and enterprise applications. Our guide, below, illustrates the key differences.
| Complex = |  |
Easy = |  |
| Selenium | Silk WebDriver | Silk Test | |
| CORE FEATURES | |||
| Ease of use (setup, deployment..) | |
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| Replay/API |  |
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| Recording | |
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| Verifications |  |
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| Robust locator generation | |
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| Resulting | |
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| Cross-browser testing | |
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| Keyword-driven Testing | |
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| TECH FEATURES | |||
| Multi tab support | |
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| Native dialogs | |
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| Synchronization | |
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| SUPPORTED BROWSERS | replay only | record/replay | record/replay |
| Chrome | |
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| Firefox | |
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| Edge | |
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| Mobile Chrome (on Android) | |
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| Safari on iOS | |
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| IE | |
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| Safari on macOS | |
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Don’t forget to check back often to find the updated hyperlinks to our community site! Find me on Twitter if you want to talk anything through…..but feel free to dive right in and download your <Free> copy of Silk WebDriver today.
You can also register for our upcoming Easily Create Scalable Automation Using Selenium webinar on the 18th of January.
