In my, I shared a bit about how the Selenium project work overall. Now, let ’ s start talking about Selenium 4 and what ’ s get. One thing I think I should clear up is “ why the major variation number blow? ”

Sometimes I joke that the major reason for the version number excrescence is that while the digits of Pi are infinite, when we went from 3.14 to 3.141, people got a small bit worried. Moving to 3.141.5 and then 3.141.59 was as far as we wanted to push that special idea:)

More seriously, the inaugural reason is that we have a revised Selenium IDE. Years ago, this used to be Firefox only because it used the XPI extension mechanics (which was specific to Firefox). It ’ s now a web component, and you can download it for Chrome, Firefox, and anything else that supports Web Components. There is currently work to rewrite it as an Electron app, which will allow us to make best use of the native OS the IDE is bunk on. That work was mostly pushed onward by developers working at Applitools. They started from a foot of the original Selenium IDE that had been migrate to use Web Components by a fellowship call SideX. It ’ s be a fantastic example of the community working together well.

Secondly, we have fully adopted the W3C WebDriver protocol, and feature drop support for the original home-grown wire protocol. The way that Selenium communicates with a web browser is via a wire protocol that ’ s efficaciously precisely JSON over HTTP. Originally this grew organically as we figured things out, and we tried to make browser do what we needed them to. That original protocol is known as the JSON wire protocol because it spoke JSON over the wire (and we ’ re not outstanding at coming up with very original names).

That original protocol was the bag for the W3C WebDriver protocol, which smoothed some of the rough edges, and wreak some much needed consistency to the protocol. The two major areas the standardise protocol improve on included session conception, where we take considerable ambiguity, and by providing a far rich API for specifying user actions.

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So what does this adoption of the W3C protocol mean for you? I & # x27; ll be honest: it probably doesn ’ t mean much to you at all. If you & # x27; re using a modern browser (free over the retiring match of years), you will find that actually you already mouth the W3C protocol with Selenium 3.

So who does care about the protocol idiom? When we verbalise about fellowship like Sauce Labs who provide Selenium as a service—they care about it. The ecosystem is ready for this next step, because the technical folks at these fellowship have ensure that they understand and comply with the W3C protocol, and folks from the Selenium project get been there proffer help and advice as needed.

One of the other nice thing about Selenium 4 is that we & # x27; ve done our best to ensure a stable user-facing API. That means when you upgrade your task from Selenium 3 to Selenium 4, it should be a drop-in upgrade. You but vary the edition number, recompile and you should be do.

There are a few caveat that you should be cognizant of, nonetheless! The major one is that if in the last version of Selenium 3 a method was deprecated, it ’ s now probably gone. We ’ ve lead the chance of a major edition hump to delete them and clean up the behind-the-scenes internals people don ’ t normally get to see. If you ’ re a software developer, you may recognise this as us paying off some of our technical debt:)

Stay tuned for the next post, where I ’ ll go over some.

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Early posts in this series: