What are New Features in Selenium 4.0

1)  WebDriver became W3C(World Wide Web Consortium) standardization

The standardizing the WebDriver as per the W3C standards. W3C standards encourage compatibility across different software implementations of the WebDriver API and make the Framework much more stable & reduce compatibility issues across different Web Browsers.

A test in Selenium 3 communicates with the browser at the end node through the JSON wire protocol.

Testing tools such as Appium and iOS Driver which are related to mobile testing heavily rely on JSON wire protocol.

 With Selenium 4 adapting W3C Protocol for communication between the driver and browser, Tests will now be able to directly communicate the browser without using API encoding/decoding. Which would help in mobile testing users.

2)  Improved Selenium Grid

The Selenium Grid code has been modified with many changes and needed improvements; the console of the selenium grid has been restructured.

It allows you to execute test cases in parallel on multiple browsers and systems as well as operating systems. New Grid Server supporting “standalone”, “hub”, “node”, and completely distributed usage. In Selenium 4, the process is much easier. The moment you start the Selenium Grid, it will act as both node and hub. There is also better Docker support and no chance of thread safety bugs.This new Grid Server is able to output logs in single-line json format to the stdout.

3)  Support for browsers

Native support for Opera and PhantomJS going forward will be removed. Whereas users who want to test Opera can opt Chrome since Opera is based on Chromium and for PhantomJS users can use Chrome or Firefox in headless mode. And Selenium Server now no longer includes HtmlUnit by default.

4)  New Selenium 4 IDE (Chrome & Firefox)

Selenium IDE is a Chrome and Firefox plugin which records and plays back user interactions with the browser.

Use this to either create simple scripts or assist in exploratory testing.

New plugin system – Any browser vendor will now be able to easily plug in to the new Selenium IDE. You can have your own locator strategy and plug in the Selenium IDE.

New CLI runner – It will be completely based on node.js, not the old HTML-based runner. It will have the following capabilities:

WebDriver Playback – The new Selenium IDE runner will be completely based on WebDriver.

Parallel execution — The new CLI runner will also support parallel test case execution and will provide useful information like time taken and number of test cases passed/failed.

5)   WebElement.getSize() and WebElement.getLocation() are now replaced with a single method WebElement.getRect().

getSize(): get the width and Height of the specific element on the webpage.

getLocation():get the exact "x" and "y" coordinates of the element.

Now in selenium 4 width and Height of the element and x and y coordinates of element get from single method getRect().

Code Snippet for getRect()Method

6)   Now you can configure the location of your Safari driver using the “webdriver.safari.driver” system property. 

7) Element screenshotting 

Now we can take required UI WebElement Screenshot , instead of full webpage.

Code Snippet for ScreenShot

8)  driver.switchTo().parentFrame()

We can use it to go from the child frame to the parent frame directly,instead of going to default frame.

Code Snippet for Parent Frame

9)   The Options class for every browser is now extending the Capabilities class.

10) Removed the firefox.profile class. All its functionality is now provided directly by firefox.options.

11) Operating Multiple Tabs or Browsers. 

Introduced a new method newWindow() method for opening a new blank tab or window while the originally opened window is  still open and then load different applications and perform operations in both the opened windows or tabs.

Code snippet for Operating Multiple Tabs or Browsers

12) Relative Locators

In Selenium3 each element is accessed separately as there is no way to access a web element relative to the nearby elements, now Selenium 4

You can access the element using Relative Locators using TagName.

It allow you to identify objects in your application based on other objects that are always near them.

As of now it will support below options

Above: Web element to be searched/located appears above the specified element.

Below:Web element to be searched/located appears below the specified element.

toLeftOf:Web element to be searched/located appears to the left of the specified element.

toRightOf:Web element to be searched/located appears to the right of the specified element.

Near:Web element to be searched/located is at most 50 pixels away from the specified element.

Code Snippet for Relative Locators

13) Support of ChromeDevTool 

Getting Chrome Browser Console Logs.

Ignoring Certificate Errors.

And many other operations can be performed at the Chrome Browser. Developer Tools level using Selenium Automation Scripts.

Code Snippet for DevTools