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WebDriver & Selenium Grid (Brief)

Selenium is composed of several components, the most important ones being WebDriver and Selenium Grid.

Selenium WebDriver

WebDriver is the core component of Selenium.

  • It directly controls the browser
  • Simulates real user behavior
  • Interacts with the DOM

Supported Browsers

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Edge
  • Safari

Example (Java)

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
driver.get("https://example.com");
driver.findElement(By.id("login")).click();

Advantages

  • Flexible
  • Powerful
  • Supports many programming languages

Limitations

  • Requires manual waits
  • Setup can be complex
  • Parallel execution requires extra configuration

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid allows tests to be executed in parallel across multiple browsers and machines.

What Does Grid Provide?

  • Cross-browser testing
  • Cross-platform execution
  • Faster test execution through parallelism

Typical Usage Scenarios

  • Chrome + Firefox + Edge at the same time
  • Windows + macOS + Linux environments
  • Large regression test suites

Selenium Grid is commonly used with:

  • Jenkins
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes