Selenium 4 Alpha is released now (April 28, 2019)

Selenium 4 Alpha is released now (April 28, 2019)

The following are the different points to know about the newly released Selenium 4 Alpha (April 28, 2019):

• > Not announced officially by Selenium guys yet (April 28, 2019)
  • – You can check their official website www.seleniumhq.org/download and observe that they have not updated anything about Selenium 4 Alpha release. (April 28, 2019)
• > But Selenium 4 alpha is available to download at MVN Repository (April 28, 2019)
  • – Browser www.mvnrepository.com
  • – Search for “Selenium  Java” in the above MVN repository website
  • – Select ‘Selenium Java’ link from the search results and click it
  • – You will see an alpha version of Selenium 4.0.x (4.0.0-alpha-1) for  download

• > Alpha release in general is the first phase to begin Software Testing
  • – Alpha means the first complete version which is still in development state and mostly unstable
  • – The next state that follows alpha state is beta state i.e. Preview state for entire world or its customers
  • – Current Selenium 4 is in alpha state (Hence it is not recommended to use)
• > Changes Done
  • – The Backend API’s using which Selenium is interacting with the browsers got internally changed
  • – They removed few things and added new things
  • – It won’t impact the existing Selenium 2 and Selenium 3 automation scripts though
• > W3C recommendation document for Selenium WebDriver is now available
  • – You can check this at https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/
  • – Neat and clear API documentation is provided at the above link
• > Change Documentation and Changes details
  • – Search ‘SeleniumHQ Selenium Changes.md’ in google
  • – Click on link like this: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/master/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/CHANGES.md
  • – You will find the below changes in Selenium 4 at a high level and in a technical format for now
    • — WebDriver implementation for Opera Browser is now removed (Hence  there won’t be OperaDriver class in the WebDriver API in Selenium 4)
      • >> They removed it as Opera and Chrome are based on Chromium
      • >> And the OperaDriver is a wrapper over ChromeDriver
      • >> They are suggesting the Opera users to test on Chrome Browser to some extent.
    • — Removed Support for PhantomJS Headless mode
      • >> They are suggesting to use Chrome and Firefox Browsers in headless mode instead
    • — Added driver.switchTo().parentFrame() method to switch directly to the parent frame.
    • — All window manipulation methods are now supported
    • — Replaced WebElement().getSize() and WebElement.getLocation() methods with a single method WebElement.getRect()
    • — Removed timeouts() method in driver.manage()
      • >> Suggesting to use getTimeouts() and setTimeouts() methods instead
    • — Added getRect(), setRect(), fullScreen() and minimize() methods in driver.manage().window()
    • — Removed getPosition(), setPosition(), getSize() and setSize() methods
      • >> Suggesting to use getRect() and setRect() methods instead

I will explore Selenium 4 going a head and start adding more valuable content/videos around it soon.

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Selenium 4 is going to be a game changer and guys who are in confusion of moving to other tools can freely switch back to Selenium again, as Selenium is going to upgrade and stay here for long period of time 🙂

Next Steps:

• > For more posts on Selenium 4, continue to the next post (Click on Next Post link below)
• > Check complete Selenium 4 Tutorial here (Click here)

Please leave your questions/comments/feedback below.

Happy Learning ?

About Me > Arun Motoori

Next Post on Selenium 4 alpha will be ready soon (Keep checking here) >>