What is Selenium, and what is it used for?

Selenium is an open-source automation testing framework that enables you to automate testing for your website or web applications across numerous browsers, browser versions, and operating systems. It supports multiple programming languages like Java, JavaScript, Python, and more to perform automated browser testing.

Using Selenium, one can expedite software release cycles by automating repetitive test cases. Integrating Selenium with your CI/CD pipeline offers a hasten, hassle-free release deployment.Selenium provides a suite of tools for web browser automation, each serving its own purpose. These tools include Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver, and Selenium Grid.

Let’s have a look at the major advantages of the Selenium framework.

• Open-source: Selenium, as an open-source tool, is a publically available automation framework that is free to use. Since it is open source, you can customize the script for better code management and improve the functionality of built-in functions and classes.


• Support for multiple browsers and OS: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Edge are the most popular browsers worldwide, and Selenium is compatible with all of them. You do not need to re-write scripts for each browser; instead, you can use a single script for all browsers.

Furthermore, you can write Selenium tests for any platform, such as Windows, and then run the same test suite on another platform, like macOS or Linux. This helps you to quickly write test automation scripts without worrying about the platform on which they will run.



• Easy to use: Selenium framework is very easy-to-implement. It has a user-friendly interface that helps in the creation and execution of test scripts. You can also view your running tests and get detailed reports.


• Parallel testing: To save time and manual efforts, you can use Selenium Grid to run multiple tests in parallel, thereby reducing the test execution time.


• Reusability and integrations: Selenium test suites are reusable and can be tested across a wide range of browsers and operating systems. You can integrate the Selenium framework with other programming languages and frameworks like Java, TestNG, etc., for managing test cases and generating test reports. For continuous testing, you can also integrate it with the best CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Travis CI, etc.