The Next Generation IDE - Selenium IDE 4 is officially released.

I was thinking for few days on writing a blog but was not quite sure about what should I write about. And then I came to know a happy news which could also make a lot of other test engineers also happy. Well let me tell you what it is all about. 

As you all may know, back in August Selenium has officially announced the deprecation of Selenium IDE. If we talk about the user statistics, Selenium IDE was having: 

• 3,000,000+ downloads 
• 150,000+ weekly users
• 1000+ daily installations

For those who don't know about the selenium IDE, It is an open-source record-playback tool for the web. The IDE was utilized by many test automation experts around the globe, and then they don't had any proper tool to get help with. I was also a bit sad about this since I was depending on this tool for finding custom locators, but for me it turn around well because then I learned to write locators without depending on any tool. Well that's my case, but there might be a lot of other test engineers who still find it very hard. 

 But now it's back with new look and pretty cool features. Selenium IDE has now got a pretty good upgrade and Simon Stewart, Selenium Project Lead and Creator of WebDriver, revealed the new Selenium IDE in a special live session, including capabilities, features, and roadmap. They call it Selenium IDE 4.0 which also will be a great supporting factor for the Selenium Webdriver ver 4.0 which is in beta stage. 

Selenium IDE 4 also known as Selenium IDE TNG will be a web extension and it is standardized with the W3C and hence it could be run in any browsers compared to the old version. The UI still remains somewhat similar to what we had before. Also they have made some great improvisations in terms of locators and better support for common tasks. 

For continuous integration purpose they have also implemented a new selenium ide runner which is a command line tool which is great for parallel executions, grid executions and can also be configured through capabilities. 

You can install the runner by simply running the following command:

npm install -g selenium- side-runner 

or

yarn global add selenium- side-runner

And another great feature is the usage of control flow. Earlier we were not able to use the control flow statement/conditions like if loop, while loops etc. Now you can use condition based statemets in the selenium ide for getting things done more efficiently. 

Another key feature which we need to mention is the usage of fallback locators. Now when you record it will also save about 5 different other locators that will be in action id any fallback condition is happening. That means if you find you page changing frequently with new id's or attributes, u need not worry because any of the other locators can be used. I am sure that these features are gonna give a better stability to our tests. 

You can also create custom plugins for adding new commands, locators, control set up and tear down etc, which is another cool feature. You can have a look on the wiki to know more about how to do execute it effectively. It is really well explained there. 

Their roadmap also include pretty cool features like Exporting tests to programming languages, Empowered data driven testing etc. 

You can download the latest version of Selenium IDE by clicking these link: 

Useful Links

• Selenium IDE for Chrome
• Selenium IDE for FireFox
• Instructions for creating a new command (or plugin) for IDE can be found here. 
• People interested in getting the code for IDE itself can go the Selenium IDE page on GitHub.

Happy Testing, Stay tuned!