The journey of Selenium is itself very interesting from its origin to Selenium WebDriver. Selenium was introduced first by Jason Huggins as part of his web project at ThoughtWorks. Later he worked on making Selenium an open-source tool, and he named it Selenium Core.
Later another engineer at ThoughtWorks, Paul Hammant, created a server that acted as an HTTP proxy to convince the browser that Selenium core and Web application being tested come from the same domain. These changes termed a new name Selenium Remote Control (RC).
But with Selenium RC, a user had to launch a Selenium RC server before starting the testing. This was the reason to get a fast and quick communication medium.
Here comes the hero into the picture i.e., WebDriver. In 2006 Simon Stewart created WebDriver circa, which directly controls the browsers with the help of browser drivers. It is swift and smooth in comparison to Selenium RC, and this was the reason Selenium RC adopted the concept of WebDriver. All the developers put their findings into one table and created Selenium 2.
WebDriver provides a channel of communication between the user and browser with the help of standard browser drivers and coded scripts.
WebDriver Analogy with Cab taxi service:
Cab service process
Cab service process has three different roles a customer, Cab driver, and Taxi. In this way, when the customer contacts the driver first and then the driver drives the Taxi to complete the customer rides.
WebDriver in Test Automation
In the same way, Webdriver works where the user gives instructions to browser driver in the form of coded scripts, and then the driver drives that instruction on the browser to complete the tasks of the user.
Here we can observe that whenever a Test engineer needs to run a command on a web browser, they have to first interact with the browser driver as a medium of communicator between tester and browser.
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