What is Selenium and why should we use it?
- qatestingthreesixt
- Dec 1, 2021
- 3 min read
Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms. It is quite similar to HP Quick Test Pro (QTP now UFT) only that Selenium focuses on automating web-based applications. Testing done using Selenium tool is usually referred as Selenium Testing.
Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software's, each catering to different testing needs of an organization. It has four components; Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Selenium Remote Control (RC), WebDriver and Selenium Grid.

Since Selenium is a collection of different tools, it had different developers as well. Primarily, Selenium was created by Jason Huggins in 2004. An engineer at ThoughtWorks, he was working on a web application that required frequent testing. Having realized that the repetitious Manual Testing of their application was becoming more and more inefficient, he created a JavaScript program that would automatically control the browser's actions. He named this program as the "JavaScriptTestRunner." Seeing potential in this idea to help automate other web applications, he made JavaScriptRunner open-source which was later re-named as Selenium Core.
The Same Origin Policy Issue
Same Origin policy prohibits JavaScript code from accessing elements from a domain that is different from where it was launched. Example, the HTML code in www.google.com uses a JavaScript program "randomScript.js". The same origin policy will only allow randomScript.js to access pages within google.com such as google.com/mail, google.com/login, or google.com/signup. However, it cannot access pages from different sites such as yahoo.com/search or because they belong to different domains.
The Name Selenium
It came from a joke which Jason cracked one time to his team. Another automated testing framework was popular during Selenium's development, and it was by the company called Mercury Interactive (yes, the company who originally made QTP before it was acquired by HP). Since Selenium is a well-known antidote for Mercury poisoning, Jason suggested that name. His teammates took it, and so that is how we got to call this framework up to the present.
Why Selenium?
Demand for web development and testing is huge. As of January 2018, there were over 1.3 billion websites on the internet serving 3.8+ billion internet users worldwide (statistics here). As the result, the tooling market is now more competitive than ever. Commercial tool vendors are fiercely stomping on each other to get a piece of the test tool pie. But so far, no one has outshone Selenium in terms of popularity and adoption.
The biggest sweet spot of Selenium is the fact that it is open source. In other words, it is completely free to download and use. Selenium provides an API called WebDriver which enables testers to craft their tests in many programming languages, including Java, C#, Python, etc. Besides web browsers, you can also automate mobile devices like Android, and iOS via Appium. With all of those capabilities at our fingertips, we might feel invincible. Test automation is now problem-free.
So, Selenium is basically an open source framework that facilitates testing of web applications. Since selenium is open source in nature, there is no licensing cost involved in it. Manual testing of software applications is a tedious process; selenium definitely makes this job easier.
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