Selenium 3 vs. Selenium 4: What’s New for QA Engineers

Selenium is a popular automation testing framework used by QA engineers to test web applications. Selenium 4 introduced several enhancements and changes over Selenium 3. Here’s a comparison of the two versions:

WebDriver W3C Standardization:

• Selenium 3: It primarily relied on the Selenium WebDriver API, which had some limitations and inconsistencies across different browsers.
• Selenium 4: It adopts the WebDriver W3C Standard, which provides more consistency in interactions with web elements across browsers. This improves cross-browser testing.

Relative Locators:

• Selenium 3: You had to rely on traditional locators like XPath or CSS for element identification.
• Selenium 4: Introduces Relative Locators, making it easier to locate elements based on their proximity to other elements (e.g., above, below, to the left, to the right). This simplifies complex element locating scenarios.

New Features for JavaScript Execution:

• Selenium 3: Limited support for executing JavaScript in the browser.
• Selenium 4: Enhancements in executing JavaScript code in the browser with new methods like executeAsyncScript. This allows you to work with JavaScript promises and async/await.

Improved Event Listeners:

• Selenium 3: Limited support for event listeners.
• Selenium 4: Offers more comprehensive support for listening to browser events, making it easier to track user interactions and events like page load, clicks, and more.

New Browsers and Grid Features:

• Selenium 3: Had limitations when working with the latest browser versions and grid configurations.
• Selenium 4: Supports the latest browser versions and includes features like a new Grid interface (Grid 4) for better scalability and stability.

DevTools Integration:

• Selenium 3: Lacked native support for browser DevTools.
• Selenium 4: Provides native integration with browser DevTools, enabling advanced debugging and performance analysis during test execution.

Automatic Browser Updates:

• Selenium 3: Required manual updates for browser drivers.
• Selenium 4: Offers automatic browser driver updates, reducing maintenance efforts.

Improved Documentation:

• Selenium 4: Comes with improved and updated documentation, making it easier for QA engineers to understand and use the framework effectively.

Backward Compatibility:

• Selenium 4 aims to maintain backward compatibility with Selenium 3 to ease the transition for existing projects.

Community and Support:

• Selenium 4 is expected to have better community support and active development, ensuring ongoing improvements and bug fixes.

In summary, Selenium 4 brings significant improvements in terms of standardization, ease of use, browser support, and debugging capabilities. QA engineers should consider upgrading to Selenium 4 for better web application testing experiences. However, it’s essential to thoroughly test your existing test suites after the upgrade to address any potential compatibility issues.