The whole Webdriverio development team is stoked and proud to release WebdriverIO v9 today!

WebdriverIO is build to test various types of applications, from web or mobile applications towards native desktop apps or even VS Code extensions. But what about Chrome DevTools plugins? In this blog post we explore how one could interact with an extension build for Chrome Devtools.

We are thrilled to announce the latest update to the WebdriverIO Visual Testing module. This release brings two significant enhancements: making the Visual Testing Module a pure JS module and the introduction of a new CLI argument for automatic baseline updates.

We're excited to announce support for DOM and Visual snapshot tests using a common set of primitives supporting all testing environments WebdriverIO offers. Our vision has always been to provide a comprehensive, versatile testing tool that simplifies your workflow. This update is a step towards creating a 'Swiss Army Knife' for unit and visual testing, catering to diverse requirements across platforms and extending our support to native mobile applications, making your testing process more efficient and seamless.

The WebdriverIO community is on the verge of an exciting new era, supported by strategic partnerships with BrowserStack and Sauce Labs, along with continuous support from other sponsors like LambdaTest. This collective endeavor signifies a crucial milestone for the WebdriverIO project, as we utilize these additional resources to foster the growth and enrichment of our ecosystem.

We are thrilled to announce an exciting development in our journey towards innovation in software testing and quality assurance. Sauce Labs, a pioneering force in the continuous testing arena, is joining forces with us through our Partnership Program. This collaboration marks a significant milestone in our quest to expand our development fund, enabling us to enhance our work on major releases and introduce groundbreaking features yet to be unveiled.

We are thrilled to share some fantastic news: WebdriverIO and BrowserStack have embarked on a groundbreaking partnership, set to significantly boost the development and community engagement of our project!

Embark on a transformative journey into the dynamic landscape of test automation with the compelling and instructive guide, "Enhanced Test Automation with WebdriverIO - Unlock the Superpowers of Hybrid Testing Frameworks." Authored with the dual purpose of empowering both newcomers and seasoned developers, this comprehensive book serves as an indispensable manual for mastering advanced WebdriverIO concepts, specifically tailored for end-to-end testing of web applications.

Since its inception, WebdriverIO has been a powerful tool for automating browsers through the WebDriver protocol. As many of you know, WebDriver is the web standard for automating real browsers, not just browser engines, allowing you to closely simulate the environment used by your users and customers.

With the release of WebdriverIO v8 we introduced the ability to connect with the WebDriver Bidi protocol directly. This allowed users to access the new capabilities of the protocol in a rudimental way as its development progresses. Today, with every browser release more capabilities will be enabled, so it is time for WebdriverIO to step up its integration and make these easier accessible to the user.

This article is a must-read for those experiencing headaches with mobile automation testing in the context of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD), particularly when it involves native mobile Apps for Android and iOS. It’s quite challenging to find sufficient resources that cover this specific topic.

The WebdriverIO framework is a versatile tool that offers a lot of features for you to play around with. The goal of our project documentation is to communicate these features well and give you an understanding, on how they could be applied in your project. A central contributor to this are code examples. Many times they can convey the principle idea of a feature like a picture that is worth a thousand words.

While it took a bit longer than expected the WebdriverIO team is excited to announce that we finally released v8 today! 🎉 🎉 🎉

Fetching elements within e2e tests can sometimes be very hard. Complex CSS paths or arbitrary test ids make them either less readable or prone to failures. The disappointment we experience when our test fail is by far not comparable to a the bad experience people have when they need to use assistent devices like screen readers on applications build without accessibility in mind.

WebdriverIO is one of the most popular test frameworks and an excellent Web integration tool.

For many years one of the selling features of the WebdriverIO framework was its synchronous API. Especially for folks coming from more synchronous oriented languages such as Java or Ruby, it has helped to avoid race conditions when executing commands. But also people that are more familiar with Promises tend to prefer synchronous execution as it made the code easier to read and handle.

JW Player is an embeddable, online video player which generates over a billion unique views every day. In order to sustain and grow this scale, the player needs to be able to function on a multitude of different web and mobile platforms. This increases the importance of automated testing to improve confidence in our releases when deploying to so many different targets. After a lengthy project of converting our legacy test framework, which comprised over 6,000 tests, the Test Engineering team at JW Player has been able to deliver more timely releases with fewer regressions. We have experienced no major rollbacks, and increased the confidence we have in the quality of our own product, thanks to WebdriverIO.

Today the WebdriverIO team announced in their OpenJS Foundation Q&A session that the project opens an OpenCollective to allow users and companies to donate to the development of the project and support community members to run WebdriverIO workshops and other types of events. This allows everyone to be paid to work on features and bug fixes as well as help the community to pay for pizza or rental space when hosting WebdriverIO workshops or meetups.

Until now, WebdriverIO has created a separate instance to run each of the spec files. So, if we have a directory structure that looks something like this:

It's the time of the year where the WebdriverIO project is releasing a new major update. It’s almost become a tradition for us to rewrite the complete code base to further grow the project. When we announced the v5 update, we moved from a multi-repository setup to a mono-repo. This time, the rewrite of the code base is just as important and impactful, but comes with almost no implications for the end user. As more and more contributors have joined the project, we've noticed that using pure JavaScript can be helpful to keep the entry barrier for contributions low, but that it ultimately decreases the quality of contributions overall. With the growing size of the code in the project, keeping up with all the different types that were thrown around was becoming more difficult for us as core contributors. Since we already had a lot of TypeScript fans among us, we decided to move to TypeScript quickly after meeting at the OpenJS Collaborator Summit.