Notes: Selenium 4 With Simon Stewart

Simon Stewart, the Selenium product lead, the creator of WebDriver gave a brief preview on what is coming up with Selenium 4.

Selenium, Simon says, is a family: Selenium WebDriver, Selenium Grid, and now Selenium IDE.


https://youtu.be/6iHdvOYdJk8

Selenium IDE

Some notes on Selenium IDE:

• The new Selenium IDE is brought to you through Applitools who based their work on something from SideEx.org. Selenium IDE is the on-ramp for Selenium itself, for people who are not developers. 
• Selenium IDE is converted from a Firefox extension to an Electron app
• With Selenium IDE you will be able to add your own extensions and plugins 

I asked Simon on Twitter about SideEx.org. He said:

Ah! They took the original selenium ide (the one that was using the old Firefox extension mechanism) and made it work as a Web Extension. That’s the starting point for the new ide.

— Simon Mavi Stewart (@shs96c) June 24, 2019

If you are looking for more of a walkthrough of Selenium IDE, Dave Haefner, now at Applitools, prepared a course for Angie Jones' Test Automation University:

Friendly Locators

Another new feature I was impressed by? Simon mentioned that they are planning on coming up with what they are calling "Friendly Locators": When searching for elements, you will be able to use keywords such as Near, above, below, left of, right of.

Docker Functionality

Selenium Grid is going to be modernized, so it can be scalable and be run using Docker. Yes, you can do that now, Simon mentioned, using Zalenium or Selenoid, but this will be built in.

Simon Broadcasted the Webinar From his Car

Congratulations on being a new dad! It's hard getting the balance right :) What no-one saw was @pinmav quietly doing her own work in the other seat of the car. I'd not be able to do half the things I do without her. She's amazing! pic.twitter.com/hI7QYxCY8Y

— Simon Mavi Stewart (@shs96c) June 23, 2019

Thank you for the wonderful webinar, Simon!

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston

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