In 2013, I remember reading an article in Selenium’s official site about the upcoming release of Selenium WebDriver 3, the next version to come, sometime around the end of the year. Since Selenium 2.53 was a significantly powerful version, it was unimaginable to me to experience anything that could over power it. But, I was still curious to see the changes they’ve come up with. So, news is that recently the awaited version has been released and it’s possible to finally download and start working with Selenium 3. Although it’s currently the beta version, it’s still good enough. At the moment, the third version is compatible with Java and Ruby.
After several tests and researches I have executed myself, here are my thoughts so far:
- First thing first, if you’re working with Java and you have a version below 8 installed, you won’t be able to work with Selenium 3.
- Firefox’s driver support is still under Mozilla, but now the driver is outside the browser. This means that the path of the driver should be defined in code/global variables (exactly the same way we used to work with Chrome’s driver). Mozilla’s driver is geckodriver– which you’ll need to download.
- Apple took ownership and supports the web driver on safari’s 10.0 (at last, they acknowledged this project).
- Edge’s driver support is under Microsoft that wrote the Driver Server.
- There is no more support for Internet Explorer versions lower than 9 (also because of the fact that Microsoft itself stopped supporting them).
- No more support for the Selenium RC (does anyone still use it?)
- I executed different tests on a variety of browsers; the first thing I have to mention is that it does work. Meaning, regarding the backward compatibility, I didn’t experience any special problems. The test execution was performed on Windows 7 SP1 – 64 Bit:
- Chrome browser (version 52, 64 Bit)
- Firefox browser (version 0.1)
- Safari browser (on Windows)
- Internet Explorer browser (version 11)
- Edge browser (Microsoft’s new browser)
- A virtual browser – HTML Unit
The tests immediately called for Selenium’s API and I’ve also used Page Objects.
Like I said, I didn’t experience any issues with the backward compatibility.
To download the official Selenium 3 version from the official site, enter here: http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/
In case you’re looking for a guide to Create a Test Automation Framework with C#, Selenium Webdriver & NUnit, here’s a good one here.
I’m curious to know – what is your impression with Selenium WebDriver 3.0? Please share in the comments below.
Good luck, Yoni
Will this driver work with Safari < 10.0 ?
Hi Marat,
I didn’t have the chance to test it under older versions of Safari.
As far as I read, it supports Starting with Safari 10 on OS X El Capitan
Yoni.
Since its Beta Version, should we wait some more time to update selenium version for our automation framework?
My team has been using Selenium Webdriver 3.0 for last 1 month. We write tests in C#.
After upgrading from 2.53 to 3.0, Chrome and IE were fine.
But Firefox gecko driver nuget package version 0.9.0 doesn’t work.
So I had to download latest driver version 0.11.1 separately and add it to the project.
We are using Selenium grid as well and the node config file also need to be changed:
the -D attributes (environment variables) for node command now come before “Jar” attribute in Java command like following:
Java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=c:\\Grid\\lib\\ChromeDriver2.25\\chromedriver.exe -Dwebdriver.gecko.driver=c:\\Grid\\lib\\GeckoDriver0.11.1\\geckodriver.exe -Dwebdriver.ie.driver=C:\\Grid\\lib\\IEDriverServer3.0.0\\IEDriverServer.exe -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.0.1.jar -role node -nodeConfig DefaultNode.json -log C:\\Grid\\logs\\selenium.log
Is HTMLUNIT supports Webdriver3? ?
Hi, Never tried it on the new version, but I see they did implement the HtmlUnit jar files into the project,
More than that, you can find the documentation at HtmlUnit project (https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/htmlunit-driver) which supports Selenium3
I’m here just to share my experience with Selenium3, which so far hasn’t been good at all.
I have a bunch of tests running on Selenium 2.53.1 with Firefox using Selenium Grid.
The need to use now geckodriver have resulted in crashes all over Firefox for almost every Spec, what does not happen for the current version.
Changing to Chrome was “ok”. I had to change some tests, because the browser behaves a bit different, but still I get different errors running tests against the grid.
Many random errors with exceptions reported on Chromium website as possible bugs (all intermittent).
Problems to create a new session, to determine loading status and to communicate with the grid are a few examples.
I’ve been catching up all the info from GitHub website, but honestly, so far in my case it’s been a nightmare – unfortunately.
Maybe it’s not even something related to Selenium, but with chromedriver and geckodriver, but in the end it turns out to make it an impossible move.
Hope you guys have better experiences.