OperaDriver, Test Web Pages Without Efforts

About one year ago, Andreas Tolf Tolfsen announced OperaWatir, a library for driving the Opera browser. To use the library, you needed to brush up a few scripts in Ruby and start testing. Your first thought is

Hey I drive the Web myself. In manual mode! I do not need assistance. What the heck… a driver!

Well, your perspective might change when the Project manager comes to you and says:

We are going to prod in two days. You have to test the 100 Web pages. Ah by the way… I meant all browsers.

Oops… A few drops of sweat later and a few searches on Google, you found Selenium, the mothership of all Web testing. Selenium has developed a protocol to help implementers to develop specific Web drivers emulating or connecting to the browsers UI.

So over the last one year, a few updates have been made:

  • Opera has released the source code of its Web driver.
  • OperaDriver 0.8.1 (see also version 0.8) was released last week introducing the ability to parallelized testing on all OSes. You can now run multiple instances of Opera/OperaDriver simultaneously.
  • There are only two drivers in the stack which are maintained by their own company: OperaDriver and ChromeDriver.
  • OperaDriver's performance has improved significantly. In fact, we are already fast, because our driver is directly plugged to the core engine.
  • But in addition to that, the WebDriver is really emulating what a user would do by interacting with the browser.
  • With the WebDriver API, we are implementing the Selenium API. This makes you not put in any extra efforts for testing with Opera.

A W3C for Browser Testing and Tools Working Group is being discussed. You can read the charter and join. The first F2F meeting will be in London in January.

So now, you can use OperaDriver and finish your project ready to go on production in two days. Go. Start. Play.