The latest versions of Safari come with safaridriver, an in-built option to carry out websites’ debugging. See how to test on macOS using Selenium Safari’s driver.

We all know that Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world. But do you know, with 17.24% of the overall browser market share, Safari is the second most popular one?

The reason behind Safari’s strong presence is that it is the default web browser for all Apple devices. And we know how much developers and coders love macOS, making it absolutely necessary to ensure that our websites’ are tested and optimized for all Safari versions.

The latest versions of Safari (10 and above) come with safaridriver, an in-built option to carry out websites’ debugging. However, the earlier versions of Safari required you to install the Safari WebDriver extension, which is no longer supported in the latest versions. Safari browser instead uses the safari driver to implement WebDriver protocol.

In this blog, we will see how to use the Selenium safari driver to perform testing on the Safari browser.

Note: You need to have Safari on the Mac machine, as Apple has withdrawn the support of SafariDriver from Safari browsers on Windows.

Selenium Safari Driver For Automation Testing

To use the Selenium framework for automation testing, you should have a corresponding Selenium WebDriver (e.g., Chrome WebDriver for Chrome, Geckodriver for Firefox, etc.) installed on the machine. However, in Selenium automation testing with Safari on macOS, there is no need to download Safari driver for Selenium WebDriver separately.

Starting from Safari 10 on OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra, the browser provides native support for the Selenium WebDriver API. As the Selenium Safari Driver for mac is preloaded on the OS, you need not mention the executable path for creating the Selenium WebDriver object.

#selenium #macos #testing