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Selenium Essentials
Selenium Essentials

Selenium Essentials: Get to grips with automated web testing with the amazing power of Selenium WebDriver

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Selenium Essentials

Chapter 2. Selenium WebDriver Cross-browser Tests

The term cross-browser testing can be applied to both multi-browser testing and compatibility testing. Testing the web application with multiple web browsers is defined as cross-browser testing. A lack of cross-browser testing results in layout and functionality issues. Manually testing an application needs a lot of human effort and time to finish a complex job, but automated tests are carried out to avoid such issues. In general, most of the cross-browser issues are generated while rendering web page elements, which results in a functional and UI-based mess. Selenium WebDriver provides excellent support for automating test cases with the most popular browsers, using their own drivers. Selenium cross-browser tests can also be automated on the cloud using web application tools, such as SauceLabs, BrowserStack, and TestingBot.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Selenium WebDriver compatibility tests
  • Selenium cross...

Selenium WebDriver compatibility tests

Selenium WebDriver handles browser compatibility tests on almost every popular browser, including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera. In general, every browser's JavaScript engine differs from the others, and each browser interprets the HTML tags differently. The WebDriver API drives the web browser as the real user would drive it. By default, FirefoxDriver comes with the selenium-server-standalone.jar library added, but for Chrome, IE, and Opera, there are libraries that need to be added or instantiated externally.

Let's see how we can instantiate each of the following browsers through its own driver:

  • Mozilla Firefox: The selenium-server-standalone library is bundled with FirefoxDriver to initialize and run tests in a Firefox browser. FirefoxDriver is added to the Firefox profile as a file extension on starting a new instance of FirefoxDriver. Please check the Firefox versions and its suitable drivers at http://selenium...

Selenium cross-browser tests on the cloud

The ability to automate Selenium tests on the cloud is quite interesting, with instant access to real devices. Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, and TestingBot are the leading web-based tools used for cross-browser compatibility checking. These tools contain unique test automation features, such as diagnosing failures through screenshots and video, executing parallel tests, running Appium mobile automation tests, executing tests on internal local servers, and so on.

SauceLabs

SauceLabs is the standard Selenium test automation web app to do cross-browser compatibility tests on the cloud. It lets you automate tests in your favorite programming languages, using test frameworks such as JUnit, TestNG, Rspec, and many more. SauceLabs cloud tests can also be executed from the Selenium Builder IDE interface. Check for the available SauceLabs devices, OS, and platforms at https://saucelabs.com/platforms.

Access the website from your web browser, log in, and obtain...

Selenium headless browser testing

A headless browser is a web browser without Graphical User Interface (GUI). It accesses and renders web pages but doesn't show them to any human being. A headless browser should be able to parse JavaScript. Currently, most of the systems encourage tests against headless browsers due to their efficiency and time-saving properties. PhantomJS and HTMLUnit are the most commonly-used headless browsers. Capybara-webkit is another efficient headless WebKit for rails-based applications.

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with the JavaScript API. It is generally used for the headless testing of web applications that come with GhostDriver built-in. Tests on PhantomJS are obviously fast since it has fast and native support for various web standards, such as DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, canvas, and SVG. In general, WebKit is a layout engine that allows web browsers to render web pages. Some browsers, such as Safari and Chrome, use WebKit.

Apparently...

Selenium WebDriver compatibility tests


Selenium WebDriver handles browser compatibility tests on almost every popular browser, including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera. In general, every browser's JavaScript engine differs from the others, and each browser interprets the HTML tags differently. The WebDriver API drives the web browser as the real user would drive it. By default, FirefoxDriver comes with the selenium-server-standalone.jar library added, but for Chrome, IE, and Opera, there are libraries that need to be added or instantiated externally.

Let's see how we can instantiate each of the following browsers through its own driver:

  • Mozilla Firefox: The selenium-server-standalone library is bundled with FirefoxDriver to initialize and run tests in a Firefox browser. FirefoxDriver is added to the Firefox profile as a file extension on starting a new instance of FirefoxDriver. Please check the Firefox versions and its suitable drivers at http://selenium.googlecode...

Selenium cross-browser tests on the cloud


The ability to automate Selenium tests on the cloud is quite interesting, with instant access to real devices. Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, and TestingBot are the leading web-based tools used for cross-browser compatibility checking. These tools contain unique test automation features, such as diagnosing failures through screenshots and video, executing parallel tests, running Appium mobile automation tests, executing tests on internal local servers, and so on.

SauceLabs

SauceLabs is the standard Selenium test automation web app to do cross-browser compatibility tests on the cloud. It lets you automate tests in your favorite programming languages, using test frameworks such as JUnit, TestNG, Rspec, and many more. SauceLabs cloud tests can also be executed from the Selenium Builder IDE interface. Check for the available SauceLabs devices, OS, and platforms at https://saucelabs.com/platforms.

Access the website from your web browser, log in, and obtain the...

Selenium headless browser testing


A headless browser is a web browser without Graphical User Interface (GUI). It accesses and renders web pages but doesn't show them to any human being. A headless browser should be able to parse JavaScript. Currently, most of the systems encourage tests against headless browsers due to their efficiency and time-saving properties. PhantomJS and HTMLUnit are the most commonly-used headless browsers. Capybara-webkit is another efficient headless WebKit for rails-based applications.

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with the JavaScript API. It is generally used for the headless testing of web applications that come with GhostDriver built-in. Tests on PhantomJS are obviously fast since it has fast and native support for various web standards, such as DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, canvas, and SVG. In general, WebKit is a layout engine that allows web browsers to render web pages. Some browsers, such as Safari and Chrome, use WebKit.

Apparently...

Switching user agents


Earlier, cryptic commands and texts were used to retrieve data from the Internet, which would act as a user agent; now, web browsers are used as user agents. To put it simply, a user agent is a tool to browse the Internet by faking another browser. In general, websites are being rendered differently on different browsers with different platforms (for example, Chrome browser on Windows 7). However, the user agents cannot render a web page similar to the selected one. The user can track their own user agent string from http://whatsmyuseragent.com/.

For example, Mozilla Firefox 5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36.

Here, Mozilla/5.0 is an application name and Chrome/36.0.1985.143 is the browser type, with version. Whenever the user enters a URL in the web browser, a request will be sent to the web server to identify the user agent; it provides the relevant data as response. Selenium WebDriver has extended its features...

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Description

If you are a developer who wants to migrate from Selenium RC or any other automation tool to Selenium WebDriver, then this book is for you. Knowledge of automation tools is necessary to follow the examples in this book.

Who is this book for?

If you are a developer who wants to migrate from Selenium RC or any other automation tool to Selenium WebDriver, then this book is for you. Knowledge of automation tools is necessary to follow the examples in this book.

What you will learn

  • Handle the Selenium IDE and Builder features efficiently
  • Integrate JavaScript with the Selenium IDE
  • Practice crossbrowser testing in your favorite browser
  • Run automated Selenium WebDriver tests on different cloud servers
  • Go through all the Selenium WebDriver functions
  • Discover how to handle the features not supported by Selenium WebDriver
  • Observe various testing techniques using available frameworks
  • Develop your own Selenium framework for wellorganized web application testing

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Length: 194 pages
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Publication date : Mar 27, 2015
Length: 194 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784397685
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Table of Contents

6 Chapters
1. The Selenium IDE Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Selenium WebDriver Cross-browser Tests Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Selenium WebDriver Functions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Selenium WebDriver Best Practices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Selenium WebDriver Frameworks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Help you as a reference book for selenium that covers all the basic automation topics
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