SeleniumLibrary has over the years lived under SeleniumLibrary and Selenium2Library names and different library versions have supported different Selenium and Python versions. This is summarized in the table below and the History section afterwards explains the project history a bit more.
| Project | Selenium Version | Python Version | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| SeleniumLibrary 2.9.2 and earlier | Selenium 1 and 2 | Python 2.5-2.7 | The original SeleniumLibrary using Selenium RC API. |
| Selenium2Library 1.8.0 and earlier | Selenium 2 and 3 | Python 2.6-2.7 | Fork of SeleniumLibrary using Selenium WebDriver API. |
| SeleniumLibrary 3.0 and 3.1 | Selenium 2 and 3 | Python 2.7 and 3.3+ | Selenium2Library renamed and with Python 3 support and new architecture. |
| SeleniumLibrary 3.2 | Selenium 3 | Python 2.7 and 3.4+ | Drops Selenium 2 support. |
| SeleniumLibrary 4.0 | Selenium 3 | Python 2.7 and 3.4+ | Plugin API and support for event friging webdriver. |
| SeleniumLibrary 4.1 | Selenium 3 | Python 2.7 and 3.5+ | Drops Python 3.4 support. |
| SeleniumLibrary 4.2 | Selenium 3 | Python 2.7 and 3.5+ | Supports only Selenium 3.141.0 or newer. |
| SeleniumLibrary 4.4 | Selenium 3 and 4 | Python 2.7 and 3.6+ | New PythonLibCore and dropped Python 3.5 support. |
| SeleniumLibrary 5.0 | Selenium 3 and 4 | Python 3.6+ | Python 2 and Jython support is dropped. |
| SeleniumLibrary 5.1 | Selenium 3 and 4 | Python 3.6+ | Robot Framework 3.1 support is dropped. |
| Selenium2Library 3.0 | Depends on SeleniumLibrary | Depends on SeleniumLibrary | Thin wrapper for SeleniumLibrary 3.0 to ease transition. |
SeleniumLibrary originally used the Selenium Remote Controller (RC) API. When Selenium 2 was introduced with the new but backwards incompatible WebDriver API, SeleniumLibrary kept using Selenium RC and separate Selenium2Library using WebDriver was forked. These projects contained mostly the same keywords and in most cases Selenium2Library was a drop-in replacement for SeleniumLibrary.
Over the years development of the old SeleniumLibrary stopped and also the Selenium RC API it used was deprecated. Selenium2Library was developed further and replaced the old library as the de facto web testing library for Robot Framework.
When Selenium 3 was released in 2016, it was otherwise backwards compatible with Selenium 2, but the deprecated Selenium RC API was removed. This had two important effects:
- The old SeleniumLibrary could not anymore be used with new Selenium versions. This project was pretty much dead.
- Selenium2Library was badly named as it supported Selenium 3 just fine. This project needed a new name.
At the same time when Selenium 3 was released, Selenium2Library was going through larger architecture changes in order to ease future maintenance and to make adding Python 3 support easier. With all these big internal and external changes, it made sense to rename Selenium2Library back to SeleniumLibrary. This decision basically meant following changes:
- Create separate repository for the old SeleniumLibrary to preserve its history since Selenium2Library was forked.
- Rename Selenium2Library project and the library itself to SeleniumLibrary.
- Add new Selenium2Library project to ease transitioning from Selenium2Library to SeleniumLibrary.
All new development is happenning in the SeleniumLibrary project.
To install the last legacy Selenium2Library version, use this command:
pip install robotframework-selenium2library==1.8.0