History of Selenium

With web applications becoming the de facto approach to developing end user applications, a solution to test is needed. This means more and more emphasis is needed on a browser automation framework to help with checking the site.

For years, people have been using Selenium IDE and Selenium RC to drive a number of different types of browsers. Selenium, when originally created by Jason Huggins, solved the issue of getting the browser to do user interactions.

This is a good automation framework; however, it is limited by the JavaScript sandbox in browsers. The JavaScript sandbox enforces security policies while JavaScript is executing to prevent malicious code executing on the client machine. The main security policy people come across is the Same Origin Policy. If you need to move from HTTP to HTTPS, like you normally would during a log on process, the browser would block the action because we are no longer in the same origin. This was quite infuriating for an average developer...