Selenium 4 comes with several new features and enhancements to improve the test automation experience. Some of the key features in Selenium 4 include:
- W3C WebDriver Support: Selenium 4 fully adopts the W3C WebDriver protocol, which ensures better compatibility with modern browsers and more consistent behavior across different WebDriver implementations.
- Relative Locators (Find By): Selenium 4 introduces new locators that allow you to locate elements based on their relationship with other elements. These locators include near, above, below, toLeftOf, and toRightOf.
- New Selenium DevTools API: Selenium 4 provides access to browser DevTools through the DevTools interface. This allows you to interact with the browser's performance, security, and network features directly from your Selenium tests.
- Improved Selenium Grid: Selenium Grid has been enhanced in Selenium 4 to support Docker-based Selenium Grid deployment. This makes it easier to set up and manage distributed test execution across multiple machines and browsers.
- Relative XPath Improvements: Selenium 4 improves the handling of relative XPath expressions, making it more efficient and reliable to use XPath locators.
- New Actions API (Actions class): Selenium 4 introduces a more streamlined and powerful Actions API for simulating user interactions like mouse clicks, keyboard actions, and drag-and-drop operations.
- Event Listener Interface: Selenium 4 provides an Event Listener interface that allows you to register event listeners for different WebDriver events, such as beforeNavigateTo, afterClickOn, etc.
- Cookie Management: Selenium 4 introduces a new Cookie class for managing cookies in the browser. You can add, delete, and modify cookies using the WebDriver API.
- Relative Scrolling: Selenium 4 enables relative scrolling, which allows you to scroll elements into view relative to other elements, making scrolling operations more precise.
- Window Management: Selenium 4 enhances window management capabilities, including support for handling multiple windows or tabs more efficiently.
- HTTP/2 Proxy Support: Selenium 4 supports HTTP/2 proxy, providing faster and more efficient data transfer between the browser and WebDriver.
- Timeouts and Waits: Selenium 4 introduces improved timeout handling and wait mechanisms to enhance the stability and reliability of test execution.
- Multi-Browser Testing: Selenium 4 supports multi-browser testing in parallel, allowing you to execute tests across multiple browsers simultaneously.
- Performance and Stability Improvements: Selenium 4 includes various performance and stability improvements to enhance the overall test execution experience.
These are some of the key features in Selenium 4 that make it a powerful and efficient automation testing tool for web applications. As Selenium continues to evolve, it remains a top choice for test automation due to its active community, extensive browser support, and continuous updates to keep up with modern web technologies.