Introduction
This article briefly reviews the history of the Selenium IDE and introduces the first impressions of this released version.
At the moment (January 2021), it is version 3.17.0, and it can be supported by cross-browser Chrome and Firefox.
What is Selenium IDE?
Selenium IDE is a capture/replay tool that runs on a web browser. Capturing and replaying means recording a user’s actions and allowing them to be executed as-is. It is developed and released by Selenium HQ, an open-source community that develops software for automatically operating web browsers.
In the Selenium community, the development of a library for programming languages called Selenium WebDriver is currently the mainstream, but the Selenium IDE has been used by many users because it is easy to use and the function of linking with Selenium WebDriver. I did.
This tool was available as a Firefox add-in until the September 2015 release.
End of support and restart of Selenium IDE
However, in August 2017, with the update to version 55 of Firefox, the Selenium IDE was no longer supported and could not be operated. You can use the old Selenium IDE by leaving the Firefox version at 54, or by using Firefox ESR, an extended support version for enterprises, but the former is a security issue. And even with the latter, support will end on August 28, 2018, so it will not be a fundamental solution. This itself had been announced for some time, but since it was used by many users, many people were confused even on the Internet.
As mentioned at the beginning, the next version of the Selenium IDE, which had been under development on Github for several months, was released at the end of last year. This is made by forking (derivative development) the test tool “SideeX” that runs on a browser like Selenium IDE. SideeX itself is a tool that the Selenium IDE inspired, and it is the form that the head family adopted the so-called inspiration destination.
Try using Selenium IDE
Let’s use it. For the Chrome version and Firefox versions, search for “Selenium IDE” from the web store to display the corresponding page.
After installation, click the button next to the address bar to launch the Selenium IDE screen. This is the same as the old version of Selenium IDE. The screen configuration that started is the same as the old version.
By clicking the “Start recording” button on the upper right, you can record the operations on the browser. Here, I tried to search for “values” on the “Google” page and display them.
If you click the “Run current test” button here, the previous operation will be reproduced.
Compared to the old version, it seems to be a little slower, but it works much faster than manually operating it.
Selenium IDE commands
Open the Command list box to see the browser operation commands provided by the Selenium IDE. What is worrisome here is that there are no “~ AndWait” commands such as “ClickAndWait” that existed in previous versions.
Traditional Selenium IDEs used a command called “Click And Wait” instead of a “Click” command to pause the execution of a command, for example, until the linked page was displayed when the link was clicked. The script I just recorded uses the command “Click at”. This is thought to have been followed, as it was announced in SideeX, the fork source, that “all commands are automatically paused as needed”.
This is a nice change, as the script author had to decide whether to pause or not.
Other features
I will omit the detailed introduction, but in addition to that, it was possible to use it with the conventional IDE, such as a button to get the element in the Web page in the Target column, a button to search for the component in the Target column, create a test suite, adjust the execution speed, etc. It seems that the function is prepared. However, since the contents of the command have not been scrutinized, there may be an operation such as “I couldn’t do it before!”.
Also, it seems that the file save format has changed from the HTML-based one to the JSON format. There is currently no compatibility with existing tools or the ability to export to formats such as Selenium Web Driver.
summary
It can be said that the prospects have become brighter with the appearance of the successor tool from the Selenium official. In addition, since it is created using a browser-common specification called Web-Extension, future cross-browser support can be expected.
However, at this stage, it is not compatible with past scripts, there is no export function to other testing frameworks, plugins that were abundant in the previous version can not be used, etc. It’s not enough to say that you can do the same thing.
However, if expectations rise, it is expected that the addition of functions will be promoted more and more, so future updates are awaited.
