Why we assign firefox instance to webdriver

Question

Why we assign firefox driver instance to WebDriver? WebDriver driver=new FirefoxDriver()

I know that this is kind of Late binding in Java, because we can assign IEDriver or some other instance to WebDriver at later point of time.

1: But this applies to classes, right?

2: WebDriver is an interface, then can we create an object instance of an interface?

Answer 1

Webdriver is an interface, not a class. We create a Webdriver reference driver and assign it to an object of class FirefoxDriver. To perform the testing on Firefox, make an object of class FirefoxDriver. Likewise, to test on chrome, use Chromedriver class' object and assign it to Webdriver. Webdriver is an interface which is implemented by both FirefoxDriver class and ChromeDriver class(and classes for other browsers like IE, Safari). Objects of only those classes can be assigned to an interface reference which implement that interface(which in this case is Webdriver interface)