Ever since automation testing came into existence, Selenium testing has been the most commonly used approach. It has given an indelible mark, and the future of Selenium is bright as it is a widely used automated testing method for a web-based application. The incessant requirement of rigorous testing and quality assurance in complex web and mobile applications has caused a selection of Selenium. It has evolved much to meet the need of the complexity of the testing. In the coming year, it intends to grow much to remain the most used testing tool. The primary aim of the blog is to discuss the future of Selenium and the way it can evolve in the coming years.

Let’s get started with a brief introduction to Selenium

What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source automation testing tool that is used for validating web applications across different browsers and operating systems. It supports multiple languages like Java, C#, Python, etc, for creating Selenium Test Scripts. It is also regarded as the software testing suite based on Java which has created its way to become the de facto product in the quality assurance era.

Selenium-based automation testing has been adopted by various reputed companies and big technology providers like Netflix, Google, and HubSpot based on its exciting supporting capacity.

Evolution of Selenium

Let's start the discussion by stating the trends in the use of Selenium which shows its immense use and evolution. According to Enlyft, suggested software testing tools markets as shown in the illustration below. Selenium staggered at 27.48% market share of all the software testing, which is close to the competitor Apache Jmeter, closer to only 10% share. This shows that the use of Selenium has surged in recent years.

Image source: Enlyft

Further, highlighting the most preferred software testing tools, Selenium stands out in this trend, holding 64.2% of total users. It has been in the market for a long time and continuously developed and evolved to overcome its underlying limitations.

Image source: Simform

Look back to its history.

Selenium was developed in the year 20054 by Jason Huggins, and it was created using JavaScript. On using this, the weakness of manual testing was realized and thought to curb monotony. He then named this as JavaScriptTestRunner, and acknowledging the potential of the program, Selenium was made open source and renamed it as Selenium Core.

The issue of “Same Origin Policy” prevented JavaScript from being utilized from diverse domain names from which it was launched, and it created a hurdle in the download and installation of Selenium Core and Web servers. Later, Selenium Remote Control or Selenium 1 was introduced by Paul Hammant to address the above issue.

The development of Selenium Grid was done for parallel testing to address the requirement of lowering the time spent on the execution of the test to a minimum. In 2006, Selenium IDE was introduced to assist automation of the browser by the record and playback features. In the same year, Selenium WebDriver was launched to perform the test through a programmatic approach using supported language.

In 2008, the Selenium automation testing merged Selenium WebDriver and Selenium Remote Control to form tools called Selenium 2. With time new changes were made, and Selenium 2 was soon deprecated. In 2016, Selenium 3 was introduced, removing Selenium Remote Control from the legacy package. The latest version of Selenium is Selenium 4, which was launched in February 2021.

The changes and modifications in the feature of Selenium show its future where its use is going to be high.

Future of Selenium

The promising future of Selenium is evident from the latest version of Selenium 4, which is basically meant as Selenium WebDriver. A large part of the development of the product is depended on this Selenium version at present and as well as in the future.

The main reason for the adoption of Selenium in the future is due to the following added aspects:

• You can capture a snip of specific web elements.

In Selenium 3, testers were only able to capture the screenshot of the whole page. However, with Selenium 4, specific web elements can be captured easily. This has made the tester easy to use Selenium, and in the future, its feature can be brought to use.

• You can now open a new tab in the browser.

In the latest Selenium version, if you wish to open two URLs in different tabs at a similar time, it is possible to use Selenium 4.

• You can add a new window to the browser.

In Selenium 4, it is easy to open a new window on a similar browser, which was not possible in the earlier version. This has prevented some of the testers from facing difficulty in using Selenium. But with the latest version, the future of Selenium seems that many other testers can adopt it.

• You can achieve web element location.

With Selenium 4, it is easy to acquire the exact web element locations, for example, dimension, width, and height.

The above-mentioned aspects of Selenium have clarified the path for its effective use at present and future. It has eased the way of its utilization, which will lead to an increase in trend in its use by the testers and others.

Evolution of Selenium in the coming year

The latest version of Selenium defines its future, enhancing its use and expanding the market as an automation testing tool. Some of the added changes in Selenium will evolve and give wider scope for its future use. Such changes are explained below:

Improved Selenium Grid

In the previous version, Selenium Grid was very complex to set up. With the new Selenium Grid, it has Docker support which enables developers to spin up the container without relying on the virtual machine. It has also been redesigned in such a way that has helped the quality analyst to deploy Grid on Kubernetes for effective scaling. In the coming year, such an aspect will add credibility to the testing and positive evolution of Selenium.

Easy management of Selenium Grid

In the coming year, it will be easier to manage the Selenium Grid because there will be no requirement to set up and initiate hubs and nodes individually. You could be able to deploy the Grid in three different modes: Standalone mode, Hub and Node, and Fully distributed. Although such evolution was done in 2021, in the future, its use can be done widely due to the increase in the demand for automation testing, where everyone will race to meet the market demand.

Easy communication

In the earlier Selenium version, communicating with the Grid was difficult. With time and in the future, you can communicate with Grid with the use of HTTPS protocol, as it supports IPv6 addresses. It will be easy to use the configuration file in Grid 4 for spinning up the grid instances, and it will be written in Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language (TOML). TOML makes it easier for a human to understand.

Selenium now also comes with an enhanced user-friendly GUI. This, in turn, can enhance DevOps process due to its compatibility with tools like AWS and Azure.

Revived Selenium IDE

Earlier, Selenium IDE was available as a Firefox add-on, and with the introduction of its latest version, it was deprecated due to standardization under the Web Extension mechanism.

Now and in the future, you can use Selenium IDE, which is available for major web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. It has an improved GUI, comes with a Selenium IDE runner, and has an improved control flow mechanism and element locator strategy.

The location of web elements is easy.

Selenium evolution has brought an easy way of locating the elements with the use of intuitive terms which are used by users like

1. To left to

2. To right to

3. Above

4. Below

Selenium support for Chrome DevTools Protocol

In the coming year, with the use of Selenium, you can simulate poor network conditions and achieve geolocation testing. This is because, the latest version of Selenium, it supports Chrome Debugging protocol, and testers will be able to use Chrome development properties like Profiler, Fetch, and more.

Inference: Based on the above new changes done in Selenium, the testers and developers will be utilizing the new features, which will make automation testing easier. In the coming year, it is anticipated that new features of Selenium will add more robustness and reliability to automation testing.

Competition in market

In the future, there will be a huge rise in the automation testing framework and tools, which can create huge competition with Selenium. For example, Cypress is the competitor of Selenium in terms of automation testing. In the future, it is suggested that Selenium will be continued to rise as the most preferred tool over Cypress. It is articulated from the fact that cross-browser testing at scale is much easier with Selenium than Cypress as the latter does not support browsers like Safari, which limits its ability in cross-browser testing.

However, Cypress has simpler architecture, and testers tend to prefer it for automation testing. Thus, in the future, Selenium will evolve to simplify its architecture to boost good documentation and a growing community.

Further, compared with Playwright, it is faster than Selenium because it does actionability checks on elements prior to executing the action, which makes the test stable. However, with Selenium, different types of waits are used, like explicit and implicit waits, which makes the test slower. Thus, in the coming year, Selenium will evolve to be faster and more stable than other competitor tools.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have discussed the future of Selenium which showed that new changes made in the latest version of Selenium are appropriate for meeting the demand of the market in terms of adequate and faster automation testing. In the future, you can migrate without conceding on the stability of the existing test cases. LambdaTest is a cloud-based automation testing framework that has a Selenium automation Grid that helps in running end to end automation tests on robust Selenium infrastructure. In the future, it can be a great option for using Selenium automation testing.

Based on its wide use, current and in the future, it also offers great career opportunities for Selenium testers in the field of automation testing. There can be great demand for Selenium professionals as web testers.