Remarkable Changes in Past Versions of Selenium 2 WebDriver

For a long time I kept the code base of our tests running on Selenium 2.0a6. The reasons for not upgrading were different for different Selenium 2 versions - perceived stability problems in InternetExplorer or Firefox, changes being not to enough beneficial for our tests and sometimes even lack of time for the change.

Now it seems Selenium 2.8 is a good candidate for upgrade.  Following enumeration summarizes the changes we waited for and I want to use it as a thanks to all the Selenium 2 developers who participated in the effort. I also hope it wil help to anybody upgrading or considering the upgrade to a newer Selenium 2 .

1/  RenderedWebElement deprecated and removed in 2.0rc3,  method isDisplayed() was moved to WebElement class.

2/ Mouseover works since 2.0 RC2:

import org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Actions;
import org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Action;
Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
Action hoverAction = builder.moveToElement(mouseOverElement).build();
hoverAction.perform();

3/ For some time it was necessary to send Enter to a button in MSIE to press it,
but since version 2.2 clicking on buttons (WebElement.click()) seems to work flawlessly.

4/ Version 2.3 brought the nice Alert class for confirmation and alert dialogs, rendering thus JavaScript workarounds obsolete:

package org.openqa.selenium;
public interface Alert
{
  void dismiss();
  void accept();
  String getText();
  void sendKeys(String keysToSend);
}

the usage:

Alert prompt = driver.switchTo().alert();
// some short sleep here
log.debug( prompt.getText() );
prompt.sendKeys("AAA");
// some short sleep here
prompt.accept();

5/ And finally, since 2.8 important parts of the advanced interactions, double-click and right-click, work both for MSIE end FF (since 2.5for MSIE):

Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
Action doubleClick = builder.doubleClick(element).build();
doubleClick.perform();

Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
Action rightClick = builder.contextClick(element).build();
rightClick.perform();