what do you mean by browser s native support w r t to Selenium WebDriver

Question

While learning Selenium, I learnt about "Selenium Webdriver making direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation". Now, I want to know, what's this native support all about. Is it some HTML code or javascript code which interacts with the browser?

Answer 1

From Selenium v3 onwards, every browser vendor started providing the browser driver. Ex: Google chrome provide chromedriver.exe, Mozilla Firefox provide geckodriver.exe these days. However, with v2, it was Selenium which was providing the drivers for various browsers.

Each vendor is providing the browser driver because they know their browsers better and since there are methods or modules present in every browser for automation, the vendors know how to tap into the automation support by calling the right WebDriver API. Now because every browser driver is able to easily tap into that particular browser's automation support, hence the saying "Selenium Webdriver making direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation".