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Check out all the SeleniumConf London 2019 videos and photos!

SeleniumConf London 2019 Speakers

You can find all the videos here, and all the pictures here.

If you cannot wait to get started, feel free to watch below Simon’s “State of the Union” keynote!

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In August of 2017 Simon shared the bleak, hard news that as of Firefox 55 Selenium IDE would no longer work. Selenium IDE (or as we’ll refer to it from here on out – the Legacy IDE) was, and is, dead.

Since then quite a lot has happened with the IDE. We have a new version of it which we are referring to as… Selenium IDE!

It is currently in “alpha” and available for use in both Chrome and Firefox.

In his post Simon also mentioned “the fine people at Applitools“. This includes Tomer Steinfeld, Dave Haeffner, and Doron Zavalevsky. Together, along with contributions from the rest of the Selenium community and the SideeX project, we have been able to get the new Selenium IDE out into the wild. We are also working to close the gap on feature parity with its predecessor along with adding some much needed enhancements to the tool (more on that in future posts).

We’d love for you to give the new IDE a try and let us know what you think. Visit either the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons to install it. For info on how to use the tool, you can check out the getting started documentation on Selenium HQ.

If you have any questions you can find us on the Selenium Slack/IRC chat channel. Think you found a bug? File an issue. Want to contribute? Take a look at the project on GitHub.

Happy Testing!

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The bad news: from Firefox 55 onwards, Selenium IDE will no longer work.

The reasons for this are complex, but boil down to two main causes:

1. Browsers are complicated pieces of software that are constantly evolving. Mozilla has been working hard to make Firefox faster and more stable, while still retaining the flexibility and ease of extension that we’ve come to know and love. As part of that process, Firefox is switching extensions from the original “XPI” format, to a newer, more widely adopted “Web Extension” mechanism.  
2. The Selenium project lacks someone with the time and energy to move the IDE forwards to take advantage of the new technologies.

Selenium is one of the most widely used pieces of testing software there is. Despite this, the team of people regularly contributing is small: since the start of the year, there are only 11 people who have made more than 10 commits, with two people accounting for more than half of those. Since 2016, only one person has been maintaining the IDE.

Selenium is an Open Source project. None of the core contributors — not the IDE maintainer, not the language binding owners — are paid to work on work on it. They do it because they love working on the code, and they typically do it in their “copious free time”. The IDE maintainer has had almost none of that to spare. We should all be thanking that committer for his time and effort. Thank you, Samit!

So what can we do to move forward? The first thing is that there are now a wealth of tools that are stepping up to fill the gap. You should go and have a look at them. The second thing is that there is an effort to rebuild IDE using modern APIs, to be usable across more than just Firefox. The fine people at Applitools are helping with this effort.

The third thing? That’s you. You could help us.

If you believe that a friendly UI for quickly recording and playing back tests is a useful Open Source tool, then please come and join us! The main technical discussions are happening on the #selenium IRC channel. If you’d prefer Slack, you can join us on that too. Or there’s the ever useful selenium-developers mailing list. Come onboard. We’d love your help, and IDE is a wonderful thing to contribute to!

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