Selenium Critique

Question

I just wanted some opinions from people that have run Selenium (http://selenium.openqa.org) I have had a lot of experience with WaTiN and even wrote a recording suite for it. I

Answer 1

I started out with Selenium IDE and Selenium Core. Those are definitely good tools to get you started. But they're not very powerful, since you can only use Selenese, Selenium's HTML-based command-by-command language.

Now I use Selenium Remote Control with the Ruby driver, which allows me to utilize what Ruby offers. I test many environments: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac 10.4/10.5, and for each of those that apply, Safari 2/3, Firefox 2/3, Internet Explorer 6/7.

Selenium claims to be compatible with all those OS's and browsers, though I'm having problems currently with Internet Explorer (my first question on StackOverflow is about that, actually). But I don't know of any other tools that are this powerful and works with so many platforms.

The biggest problem I've had with Selenium is the DOM parsing. JavaScript's childNodes is unreliable because Safari/Firefox ignore whitespace & comment nodes, while Internet Explorer doesn't. XPath in Internet Explorer is 10-20 times slower than in SF/FF. innerHTML isn't always reliable in IE.