Introduction to Selenium WebDriver

Selenium is a free and open-source library for automated testing of web applications. Selenium was originally created in 2004 by Jason Huggins; it merged with another test framework, WebDriver, in 2011 (that’s why it is named 'selenium-webdriver') led by Simon Stewart at Google. Because WebDriver is a W3C standard, it gains support from all major browser vendors. Selenium WebDriver quickly became the de facto framework for automated testing web applications. For simplicity purposes, we will refer to Selenium-Webdriver as Selenium in this course.

The biggest advantage of Selenium over other web test frameworks is that it supports all major web browsers, e.g., Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, etc. Nowadays, the browser market is very diversified, and all the external facing websites require serious cross-browser testing. Selenium is a natural choice for this purpose, as it far exceeds other commercial tools and free test frameworks.