Selenium 2.0.0

We couldn’t be happier to hear that the 2.0 final release has landed. Everyone on the Selenium development team has done an incredible job moving this forward and making Selenium 2/Webdriver into what we believe is the best tool in the market for browser automation. As of last Friday, 2 hours after the release, we included Selenium 2.0 in our list of supported versions, allowing our users to start running tests on it by providing the right capability into their DesiredCapabilities object.

As of today, we’ve made 2.0.0 the default version for all users, as it’s proven to be the most stable and fast version.

Notice: We know some users were affected by this upgrade due to some newly unsupported commands in this release. We’ve since put in place new steps for making the upgrade process more apparent and painless for our users in the future.

Firefox 5

With the latest Selenium upgrade, support for new browsers was included as usual. And since it’s a fundamental part of our job to keep users up to date with cutting edge technology, we’ve included Firefox 5 support for both your Selenium 1 and 2 tests. Just go ahead and add Firefox version 5 to your list of browsers to test, and you should be good to go.

Scout users can also use Firefox 5 to manually test anytime. (Are you aware about Scout, our cool new tool? If not, you should!).

The new Chrome and Opera drivers

By now, you’ve hopefully seen the video of Simon Stewart presenting the new ChromeDriver during the closing keynote of  the 2011 Selenium Conference. If you were in attendance, you may recall the OH SHIT, THAT’S SO COOL! moment when attendees witnessed the new ChromeDriver running tests at blazing speeds as compared to the old version. But the importance of the new ChromeDriver and OperaDriver (which, as Simon mentioned, is just as fast and robust) is not only in their speed, but also in that they are no longer part of the Selenium codebase. They are now maintained by the right people: the browser vendors themselves. Right on, Opera and Google! We’re hoping the rest will follow along.

You can run tests using the new ChromeDriver by specifying it in your RemoteDriver’s DesiredCapabilities object. We’re currently working on getting support for the OperaDriver and will announce it as soon as it’s there. Here are the official release links in case you’re interested into getting these in your local setup too:

http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/operadriver_released/
http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/new-chromedriver/

For all of these releases, we owe a huge thank you to everyone on the Selenium development team. You guys are doing a great job, and your contributions to the project are constantly improving the quality of our service. For that (and a lot more), we humbly declare each of you the deserved owners of a Sauce t-shirt!

Happy testing!

Use the following settings in your JSON configuration:

{
    "username" : "SAUCE-USER-NAME",
    "access-key" : "SAUCE-API-KEY",
    "os" : "Windows 2003",
    "browser" : "firefox",
    "browser-version" : "3.6."
}

Sauce RC is Sauce Labs’ commercially supported version of Selenium RC that includes simplified install and administration. Sauce RC is backed by a dedicated team of engineers to ensure bugs are fixed promptly and new browsers are supported.

Congratulations and thanks to Adam Goucher for his effort in making this happen in record time.