The history of selenium

In this slide, I have explained the History of Selenium in a story narrative manner:

Topics covered

- Selenium Core (JavaScriptTestRunner)
- Same Origin Policy
- Selenium RC
- Selenium Grid
- Selenium IDE
- Selenium 1
- Selenium WebDriver
- Selenium 2
- Selenium 3
- New Selenium IDE
- Future versions of Selenium
- People behind Selenium

1. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium Automation Tutorial History of Selenium

2. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium Core Jason Huggins in the year 2004 While verifying Time and Expenses Web Application repeatedly Developed “JavaScriptTestRunner” and demoed it to huge audiences “JavaScriptTestRunner” got renamed to “Selenium Core” and released into the market as Open Source tool Demand increased for this tool and people started using it for their Web Applications

3. ARUN MOTOORI Same Origin Policy Earlier the third party or external JavaScript programs were able to access the Web Applications When the Web Application started advancing and their complexities got increases, their security concerns and measures have also increased at the same pace Same Origin Policy has hit the market as part of security measure, which restricted the external JavaScript programs from different domains accessing the pages from the Application’s domain To overcome this problems, testers had to setup their test environment in which, they had to install both Selenium Core (JavaScript Program) and Application code (Web Server) in their local machine to perform automation testing.

4. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium RC Due to “Same Origin Policy”, it was becoming difficult for the testing team, in installing the Selenium Core (JavaScript Program) and Web Application Code (Web Server) in their local machines, when ever they want to automate their tests There came another guy named ‘Paul Hammant’, who came up with an idea of creating a proxy server to trick the browser in believing that Selenium Core (JavaScript program) and Web Application code (Web Server) belong to the same domain, even though they are not As this trick was working and adapted by many, the Proxy server that is used to trick the browser in believing that everything is from the same domain was named as “Selenium RC” (Selenium Remote Control)

5. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium Grid The execution of the Automated tests used to take a good amount of time when there are a large number of tests to be executed in the project. To overcome this problem and minimize the execution time, a guy named “Patrick Lightbody” came up with a system known as “Hosted QA”, which was later named as “Selenium Grid” Using “Selenium Grid”, testers were able to distribute the tests across multiple machines and get them executed them on different machines over their network at the same time to reduce or minimize the time taken for overall execution of tests.

6. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium IDE The creation of Automation tests used to take a good amount of time using Selenium RC To overcome this problem and increase the speed of automation tests creation, there a came a guy from Japan named “Shinya Kasatani”, who developed a Firefox extension named as “Selenium IDE” “Selenium IDE” using its record and playback abilities, records the automation tests as simple as recording the videos and executes the recorded tests like playing the recorded videos.

7. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium 1 All these inventions, i.e. Selenium IDE, Selenium RC and Selenium Grid together formed Selenium 1 Selenium 1 = Selenium 1 + Selenium RC + Selenium Grid Selenium 1 was the major product of Selenium for a long period of time

8. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium WebDriver Due to “Same Origin Policy”, the JavaScript programs like “Selenium Core” were restricted by the Web Applications and the only alternative way was to trick the browsers using Proxy Servers like “Selenium RC” To overcome this problem, a guy named “Simon Stewart” has come up with the first cross platform testing framework that can control the browsers directly from the OS level of the local machines of testers. This cross platform testing framework was named as “Selenium WebDriver” “Selenium WebDriver” talks to the different browsers directly without using any trick

9. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium 2 Selenium Team has decided to merge both Selenium WebDriver and Selenium RC to form a more powerful Selenium Test Automation tool They both got merged to become “Selenium 2” Selenium WebDriver was the core of Selenium 2 and Selenium RC used to run in maintenance mode Selenium 2 = Selenium IDE + Selenium WebDriver 2.x + Selenium RC + Selenium Grid

10. ARUN MOTOORI Selenium 3 Selenium Team has decided to completely remove the dependency for Selenium RC Selenium WebDriver was upgraded to next level where the dependency of Selenium RC can be completely removed Finally Selenium Team did it and released latest version of Selenium known as Selenium 3 Selenium 3 = Selenium IDE + Selenium WebDriver 3.x + Selenium Grid

11. ARUN MOTOORI New Selenium IDE Selenium Team has deprecated the older version of Selenium IDE on August 2018 and in place of that released a new version of Selenium IDE into the market The latest version of Selenium IDE works on both Firefox and Chrome Browser

12. ARUN MOTOORI Future Version Selenium Team has announced the release of new Selenium Version i.e. Selenium 4, but has not released it yet

13. ARUN MOTOORI People behind Selenium