In the selenium conference, which happened in Bangalore India, selenium founder Simon Stewart announced selenium 4 newly added features and release date for Selenium 4. Every test automation engineer should know these new exciting updates coming in selenium 4.

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Selenium 4  New Features and release date

Selenium 4 Release Date 

Selenium 4 will be released during the last week of December around Christmas this year.

Selenium 4 New Features

The current version of selenium which is Selenium 3 i.e selenium web-driver 3, supports browser automation with multiple programming languages like java, C#, ruby, python,PHP, etc. In the last selenium conference selenium 4 is announced with new updates and features. So these are all the features that will be available in selenium 4.

1. W3C standard WebDriver

This means Selenium 4 will have w3c standardize web driver which will interact with the browser directly. So, there will be no need for JSON Wire protocol. This means better compatibility across different automation tools which use web driver API.

You can find contributions and work done on GITHUB after release.

2. Improved Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid is used to run tests in parallel. We all have encountered many performances and other minor issues with it. These got fixed in selenium 4 and we will have a new simpler and efficient Grid. Also, the User interface will be improved too. There will be better support for Docker and Kubernetes.

3. New Selenium IDE

Selenium was started with selenium IDE but it was neither maintained nor improved properly. But in selenium version 4 new selenium IDE will be available for both Firefox as well as for chrome. It will have new command line support as well as parallel run support. Selenium 4 will now also Support playback as well.

It is currently in an alpha state.

4. Improved Selenium Documentation

Selenium documentation got lot of contribution and they focused more on documentation this time. So, we will have improved and detailed documentation with selenium 4.

5. Selenium Website Redesign

Selenium's official website seleniumhq.org will be redesigned with improved UI.

6. Will Existing Scripts be affected?

There will be very minimal changes for existing scripts. If some libraries will be removed, you have to remove that from your code and add new ones. But as discussed in the conference there will be very minimal changes required.

If you are new to selenium and want to write your first script, read

How to start automation with selenium webdriver.

So, these are all the features that will be available in selenium 4. Please like our facebook page , and twitter. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the Youtube channel.

Watch the below video for more info on the selenium 4 release date and new features as discussed in the selenium conference 2018.