Hands-On Selenium WebDriver with Java

Appendix A. What’s New in Selenium 4

This appendix provides a summary of the novelties available in Selenium 4. The aim of this content is twofold. First, it enumerates the new features in the core components of the Selenium suite (i.e., WebDriver, Driver, and IDE), providing a link to the book chapter that explains each aspect. In addition, this appendix describes other aspects of the Selenium project that changed with Selenium 4, such as documentation and governance. The second objective is to identify the deprecated parts and the corresponding new features when migrating from Selenium 3 to 4.

Selenium WebDriver

The first stable version of Selenium WebDriver 4.0.0 was released on October 13, 2021. Table A-1 summarizes the most relevant new features in this version compared with the former stable version (i.e., Selenium WebDriver 3.141.59).

Table A-1. Novelties in Selenium WebDriver 4

Feature	Description	Chapter	Section
Full adoption of W3C WebDriver	Standard communication protocol between the Selenium WebDriver API and the drivers	Chapter 1	“Selenium WebDriver”
Relative locators	Location strategy based on the proximity of other web elements	Chapter 3	“Relative Locators”
Pinned scripts	Attach a piece of JavaScript to a WebDriver session	Chapter 4	“Pinned Scripts”
Element screenshots	Capture screenshots of web elements (instead of the entire page)	Chapter 4	“WebElement Screenshots”
Shadow DOM	Seamless access to a shadow tree	Chapter 4