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I'm trying to get started with Selenium, but it's extremely confusing for anyone who still doesn't know the project.

If I go to the Selenium download page I get 7 download links for things with different names, and no description of what is each one. And then the Selenium 2 download link points to a page with another 8 files.

What does all of that mean? Which ones are deprecated? Which files should I get?

What are the differences between version 1 and 2? Is the version 1 deprecated, or do we still need to mix some modules from version 1 together with version 2?

And then, after searching on Google, I find Which Selenium Tool Should I Use?, but it's a very outdated page (last edited in 2007). It also talks about a limitation of the JavaScript testing interface: Same Origin Policy. Does this limitation still apply nowadays?

What are "Selenium Core", "Selenium Remote Control", "Selenium IDE"?

How about "Selenium (standalone) Server"? Is it the same thing as the Remote Control, or something different? What is the difference between Selenium Remote Control and Selenium Server?

And then I reach an official FAQ that is also confusing, and talks about a WebDriver thing that was going to be part of Selenium. Is it already inside Selenium? Is that FAQ up-to-date? How does it relate with other Selenium parts?

After all, another way to understand this question is: "I've never used Selenium before, I'm completely lost, and the documentation doesn't help." What I need is an introduction of what are all the parts of the project, which ones are old and deprecated, which ones are needed, which ones are interchangeable, which ones work with different browsers...

(maybe it would be a nice idea to have a community wiki answer that tries to be as accurate and detailed as possible)

Community
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Denilson Sá Maia
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  • Maybe I should break up this question into multiple questions. – Denilson Sá Maia Jan 22 '11 at 10:39
  • possible duplicate of [What is the difference between Selenium Remote Control and Selenium Server?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4774277/what-is-the-difference-between-selenium-remote-control-and-selenium-server) – Denilson Sá Maia Jan 28 '11 at 11:04

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I'm not much experienced with Selenium, but recently I have started it to automate form submissions while unit testing. For starters, try Selenium IDE. It is a Firefox addon which will help you to record actions and modify/replay them.

Actually more than that. You can perform Accessor operations, which will perfom a series of recorded/configured actions and will store the end results for us to analyze later.

And then there is Assertions, which will actually check the end state of a series of actions with some pre-configured conditions.

One thing I can say you is that Selenium is very handy and easy to learn. You can write your own test cases using plain html!

Here is a great beginner video - http://wiki.openqa.org/download/attachments/400/Selenium+IDE.swf?version=1

After seeing that, read through this tutorial - http://jroller.com/selenium/

And after that, read this reference - http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-core/1.0/reference.html

It explains everything you need to know. If you are first to Selenium, you will be amazZzed to see what all things selenium can do.

Sparky
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