Features in Selenium 4

Selenium 4 comes with several new features and enhancements to improve the test automation experience. Some of the key features in Selenium 4 include:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Relative XPath Improvements: Selenium 4 improves the handling of relative XPath expressions, making it more efficient and reliable to use XPath locators.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Relative Scrolling: Selenium 4 enables relative scrolling, which allows you to scroll elements into view relative to other elements, making scrolling operations more precise.
10. Window Management: Selenium 4 enhances window management capabilities, including support for handling multiple windows or tabs more efficiently.
11. HTTP/2 Proxy Support: Selenium 4 supports HTTP/2 proxy, providing faster and more efficient data transfer between the browser and WebDriver.
12. Timeouts and Waits: Selenium 4 introduces improved timeout handling and wait mechanisms to enhance the stability and reliability of test execution.
13. Multi-Browser Testing: Selenium 4 supports multi-browser testing in parallel, allowing you to execute tests across multiple browsers simultaneously.
14. 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.