History Of Selenium

In 2004, an engineer with ThoughWorks, Jason Huggins developed a JavaScript library that could drive interactions with the page, allowing him to automatically rerun tests against multiple browsers. Later on this library eventually became Selenium Core, which underlies all the functionality of Selenium Remote Control (RC) and Selenium IDE. Selenium was ground-breaking because no other product allows to control a browser from a language of your choice.

In 2006 an engineer named Simon Stewart at Google started work on a project WebDriver. Objective was to build a testing tool that spoke directly to the browser using the ‘native’ method for the browser and operating system, thus avoiding the restrictions of a sandboxed JavaScript environment.

In 20011, Selenium and WebDriver was merged, a product named – Selenium 2 or Selenium WebDriver was released. Selenium 2 has clean and object-oriented APIs from WebDriver and interacts with browsers using their native method. Selenium 2 does not use a JavaScript sandbox, and it supports a wide range of browsers and multiple language bindings.

WebDriver uses browser-native control mechanisms to execute its tests, rather than relying solely on JavaScript, as Selenium does. WebDriver manifests as an extension in Firefox and uses the Internet Explorer automation controls, resulting in a more versatile testing tool than Selenium.