We missed Chinese New Year by a few days, but I'm happy to announce that we've just shipped #selenium4 beta 1!

If you've been waiting for the update from Se3, this should be a drop-in update, so please try the upgrade and let us know of any issues!

And once you've done that….

… try out the new stuff! Things like relative locators (to help you find elements using terms a human could understand), authenticating to websites using basic or digest authentication, intercepting network traffic (for stubbbing out backends and (*sigh*) status codes)

And if your browser is Chromium-based, we've also provided APIs for the Chrome Debugging Protocol. #Se4 supports using multiple different versions of the CDP at the same time, so you're not tied to one version of one browser either.

But the changes aren't all in the APIs. We've also rewritten the Selenium Grid in #Se4 to be better than ever. It not only supports the regular "standalone" and "hub and node" modes, but also a fully distributed mode, perfect for your favourite @kubernetesio cluster!

To make the Grid easier to understand and observable, we've made extensive use of @opentelemetry to provide tracing information (it works great with @JaegerTracing!)

If you're old school, you can still monitor it using JMX :)

In order to allow you to introspect the state of the Grid, we've also added @GraphQL support. Our brand new Grid UI is built upon it.

And, don't worry! All the new features we added in #se4 also work just as well across the Grid, including the CDP-backed pieces.

Distribute your tests with ease!

The new release has been a heck of a lot of work. There are so many people who've made contributions, but I'd like to give a shout out to the the ones that have helped since the last alpha!

Let's start with @barancev. He's landed more PRs into the tree than anyone else, covering small details like import ordering, to helping get our CI builds green, to major items, like squashing resource leaks in the new Grid. It's been amazing work!

@diegofmolina has also been doing so much. The new UI was started by @rajendra_ak, but Diego has reworked and rebuilt much of it. Diego has also been running our fortnightly status updates, and has been helping keep the project running smoothly. Huge thanks to him!

I should also say a special thank you to @pujagani, who's been adding missing abstractions to the Grid, and helping fix a huge number of issues. She's helped us to go from "we should ship something" to "we have shipped something". Thank you, Puja!

But that's not all! @alb_i986 has cleaned up the code for handling chained locators in the PageFactory. Lots of people depend on this code for their tests, and it's great that it's now nicer to work with.

Jörg Sautter has also made some performance improvements to our JSON code, allowing #se4 to perform as quickly and efficiently as possible --- who knew we used JSON so much? :)

As final thanks, I'd like to make sure that Iaroslav Naidon, Chirag Jayswal, and Ish Abbi get the acknowledgement and thanks that they deserve too. Thank you, everyone!

Well, not quite "final". Thank you to the folks at @browserstack and @saucelabs for all their help too. There are engineers from both companies who are working together to help make #se4 as good as possible. It's a wonderful thing to see & highlights the fun of OSS.