why "id" is the best way to find the element in selenium webdriver? not xpath?

Question

Why id is the best way to find the element in Selenium WebDriver? Not XPath?

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

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Under the hood it's just doing a javascript page search. Document.getElementById() is generally a constant time lookup (O(1)) because there can only be one element per an ID on page. See this answer for a more in-depth discussion. While on some browsers it's not a hash map lookup it's still likely to be much faster then xpath (see this answer).

See this perf test https://jsperf.com/getelementbyid-vs-queryselector/4 for a comparision.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

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answered Jun 14 '15 at 18:50

jpiasetz

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thanks for the answer actually i am new in selenium webdriver and i got this question from a person and he said that xpath is slow in IE and thats why "ID" is best way to search. – DJ developer Jun 14 '15 at 19:00
could you please explain more ? – DJ developer Jun 14 '15 at 19:00

why "id" is the best way to find the element in selenium webdriver? not xpath?

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