Selenium is a powerful open-source framework for automating web browser testing easily. This article covers the basics of Selenium with including its components, features, uses, and limitations while providing a detailed view of it.

Selenium is a powerful tool for controlling web browsers through programs. It is functional for all browsers, works on all major OS, and its scripts are written in various languages i.e., Python, Java, C#, etc., we will be working with Python. Selenium has four major components Selenium IDE, Selenium RC, Selenium Web driver, and Selenium GRID.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a widely used tool for testing web-based applications that checks if they are doing as expected. It is a prominent preference amongst testers for cross-browser testing and is viewed as one of the most reliable systems for web application automation evaluation. Selenium is also platform-independent, so it can provide distributed testing using the Selenium Network. Selenium is a powerful tool for controlling web browsers through programs and performing browser automation. It is functional for all browsers, works on all major OS and its scripts are written in various languages.

Selenium Features

Components

Selenium has been in the industry for a long time and is used by automation testers all around the globe.

Let’s check the four major Components of Selenium

Components of Selenium

1. Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE serves as an innovative toolkit for web testing, allowing users to record interactions with web applications. Selenium-IDE was initially created by ” Shinya Kasatani ” in 2006. Selenium IDE also helps to simplify the testing process. It is a friendly space for testers and developers to team up. This helps everyone quickly share important testing information and results, making things work better and feel accomplished.

Features of Selenium are as follows:

Features of Selenium GRID are as follows:

1. Selenium Grid allows running tests in parallel on multiple machines and managing different browser versions.
2. The ability to run tests on remote browser instances is useful to spread the load of testing across several machines.
3. Run tests in browsers running on different platforms or operating systems.

Features

The main Features of Selenium are as follows

• Multi-Browser Support.
• Multi-Language Compatibility support.
• Easy Identification and Use of Web Elements while using the selenium.
• Performance and Speed are more as compared to the other tools.
• Dynamic Web Elements are present for easy use.
• Open Source platform for use.
• Portability (Easily accessible in any OS)
• Reusability of any codes and element is possible in the tool.

For more, check out – Features of Selenium Webdriver

Applications

Selenium is an open-source tool for automating web browsers. It helps to test the website functionality easily and check the regular performance across different browsers and systems through cross-browser testing .

• Automated Web Application Testing: Selenium is mainly used for the automation testing of web applications across different browsers and platforms.
• Cross-Browser Testing: It checks the compatibility of web applications across various web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.
• Web Scraping: Automates the filter of the data from websites for purposes such as data analysis and monitoring with easy automation.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Integrates with CI/CD tools like Jenkins to enable continuous testing as part of the development pipeline and automation.
• Functional Testing: It checks the functionality of a web application against the specified requirements of the browser.

For more, check – Applications and Uses of Selenium WebDriver

Limitations

With concerning all these advantages of Selenium include some Limitations which are as follows:

• Cross-Browser Compatibility: Selenium can give regular best results across multiple browsers, but sometimes it’s restricted in that the web browsers understand and use the HTML and CSS differently from the respective browsers.
• Slow Test Execution : Because the automation depends on the various drivers with the browser that causes the process to slow. Selenium will be slow to respond when running tests on big web applications or websites
• Difficulty in Handling Dynamic Web Elements : Selenium has difficulties in interacting with dynamic web elements like ID that will change on a web page sometime which causes the test script failure while testing the same.
• Limited Support for Mobile Applications : Selenium will not provide automation on mobile application testing, so developers choose the other tools or frameworks for automation purposes.
• Limited Support for Windows-based Applications : Developers will have to depend on third-party tools or libraries for Automation testing in desktop apps using Selenium.

For more, check out: Limitation of selenium .

Conclusion

Selenium tool will help test websites but it can be slow and cause problems with some things like changing a webpage. It is good to know its limits and use other tools when needed.

Frequently Asked Questions on Selenium – Components, Features, Uses, and Limitations

Which Selenium component is best?

Selenium WebDriver

What are the 4 parameters of Selenium?

URL, host, browser and port number.

Which XPath is best in Selenium?

Relative XPath.