Over the past few months, Windows Insiders have slowly watched Microsoft retire its Internet Explorer browser in favor of its new brainchild, Edge. Unlike various other Microsoft rebranding efforts that typically involved a mere name change, the Edge browser was stripped-down and reworked from the ground up. Contrary to Internet Explorer’s current model, Microsoft is taking the introduction of Edge as an opportunity to become more standards compliant while also hosting more interoperability.
Today, the Microsoft Edge team is announcing automated testing for the Edge browser through WebDriver. WebDriver is becoming an emerging standard that allows Web developers (those that are left) to write tests and automate Web browsers for site testing. Specifically, web developers can use a programmable remote control for developing complex user scenarios. Web developers can then run those scripts an automated testing against their websites through a browser. WebDriver is already being used by web properties such as Bing, Facebook, Azure, and Google.
Microsoft has also collaborated with the Borland Silk team from Micro Focus, to refine its automation testing tools. The collaboration has helped Microsoft contribute its resulting code to an interoperable WebDriver implementation of Edge.
According Microsoft, “our implementation supports both the W3C WebDriver specification and the JSON Wire Protocol.” The addition of the JSON Wire Protocol now allows Microsoft to offer backward compatibility with existing tests for web developers using as a testing ground. Microsoft has plans to implement more WebDriver specific features, however, due to its relative infancy, Microsoft is waiting for more standardization to occur.
For interested web developers, Microsoft is encouraging the download of MicrosoftWebDriver server on a Windows Insider build of 10240 or newer. Once installed, developers are free also to download the testing framework of their choice along with the appropriate language binding. However, Microsoft notes that for security purposes, WebDriver is disabled by default. Web developers will need to download and install the MicrosoftWebDriver in the same location they test repository. From there, Edge’s WebDriver implementation should work like any other browser’s implementation.
Further reading: browsing, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, W3C, WebDriver
