Selenium has become one of the preferred tools for SQA companies. With the introduction of Selenium 4 (alpha version), SQA companies look forward to the benefits their automation teams would cherish.
This expert series post will walk you through the features of Selenium 4 and its advantages for automation testing. The graph below depicts the continuous growth of Selenium following requirements of QA services providers.

Key Features of Selenium 4

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- Introduced W3C protocol as the communication medium with browser
- Perform multiple actions on elements simultaneously, utilization of browser extensions, etc.
- Agreement of different browsers is optimized for consistent test execution
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- Selenium 4 has a new IDE plugin that can add-on with any browser
- Improved IDE will allow the customization of locators
- Improved CLI runner based on Node.js instead of HTML as in the prior version
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- Allows a single Selenium running server to act as both hub and node
- Provides an intuitive UI to assist QA engineers to track the execution sessions, connected machine details, etc.
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- Selenium 4 comes with relative locators, which support to locate the UI elements that are close to other ones in a better way
Benefits to Automation Teams
- Consistent test case execution on all browsers
- Element level screenshots
- Find nearby locators instead of complex XPaths
- Easy accessibility to core browser features
- Ability to get full-screen snapshot
- Improved APIs for Docker integration
- Updated documentation for new versions of APIs
- Removed Firefox profile
- Ability to work on multiple windows in-parallel, even using different URLs
- Ability to fetch dimensions and location ofan element
Notes

As of now, only the Alpha version of Selenium 4 has been released, so you should get familiar with these APIs. However, we recommend to wait until a stable release is announced in order to prevent any impact in the expected outcomes.
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