Difference between Selenium IDE RC and WebDriver

Question

Selenium seems to have a lot of different components and I am getting confused by going through different websites. Can anyone tell me the difference in simple way?

Answer 1

Selenium has 4 components:- IDE, Grid, RC and WebDriver.

Here is the difference between all of them:

Selenium IDE:-

• Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin which is used to create and execute test cases
• It records and plays back the interactions which the user had with the web browser
• Using IDE, you can export the programming code in different languages: Java, Ruby, Python and so on

Selenium Grid:-

• Selenium Grid is used for parallel testing or distributed testing. It allows us to execute test scripts parallelly on different machines

Selenium RC:-

• Selenium Remote Control (RC) is used to write test cases in different Programming languages
• In Selenium IDE, we can run the recorded scripts only in Firefox browser, whereas, in Selenium RC, we can run the recorded script in any browser like IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera and so on

Selenium WebDriver:-

• Selenium WebDriver is a tool used to automate testing for web application
• It allows us to execute tests against different browsers like Firefox, Chrome, IE & Safari
• Selenium WebDriver eliminated the use of Selenium Server thus making it work faster than RC