The Glorious History of SideeX - From Selenium IDE to SideeX

Selenium IDE is one of the most popular record-playback web test automation tool in the world. Do you know the new Selenium IDE was developed based on an emerging project - SideeX? This article recaps the glorious history of SideeX and its new generation.

SideeX 1 - The Vision: To Faithfully Record and Replay Like a Parrot

In mid 2015, SideeX (Selenium IDE EXtended) was created by Prof. Shin-Jie Lee and his lab members in NCKU, Taiwan. The vision is: "To faithfully record and replay like a parrot". SideeX Team got started by improving the automation capabilities of the Selenium IDE at that time. In July 2016, the first generation of SideeX (version 0.6.0) was released as an open source Firefox Add-on under Apache 2.0 license. It was presented as an extended version of Selenium IDE 2.9.1.1, developed based on XUL, with a number of expanded automation features, including auto-wait series (AJAX wait, page wait and DOM wait), and a great improvement of auto-generating commands for unnamed windows, mouseover, mousedown, scrolling, dragdrop, mousedown, and keyboard inputs. And, two new commands, editContent and chooseCancelOnNextPrompt, were introduced in SideeX. At the end of 2016, the last update (version 0.8.0) of the first generation was released.

The 1st Generation of SideeX

SideeX 2 - Getting Popular: Became the Bases of the New Official Selenium IDE and Katalon Recorder

At the end of 2016, Mozilla announced that they would not accept XUL-based Firefox Add-ons any more but WebExtensions-based instead. Therefore, SideeX Team rewrote and redesigned the GUI based on WebExtensions API together with a number of new features, including parallel running of multi-SideeX on one desktop, playing all test suites, saving all selectors of each recorded command, running on Chrome and Firefox. In September 2017, the 2nd generation (SideeX 2) was released. In the same month, SideeX 2 was adopted by Selenium as the base for developing the new Selenium IDE, and soon the source code was committed to the official Selenium IDE Github repository, which was officially introduced by Simon Stewart, Selenium Lead Committer, in SeleniumConf Berlin 2017. Later, SideeX 2 was also adopted as the bases of Katalon Recorder and Qualys Browser Recorder. At the end of 2017, more than 200,000 web testers around the world run SideeX code.

The 2nd Generation of SideeX

SideeX 3 (The New Generation) - A Quantum Jump: Comprehensive and Intensive Revision

The vision of SideeX Team did not change - To faithfully record and replay like a parrot. At the end of 2017, SideeX Team decided to create the 3rd generation (SideeX 3) that was expected to be more robust, extensible and fully-fledged. They started to incorporate the lessons learned from the previous generation, and then outlined the new project road map. Subsequently, SideeX 2 underwent an intensive program of architecture & UI redesigns, code refactoring, and new features development. The lead committer was Yun-Wen Lin. In June 2019, SideeX 3 was released. It was a comprehensive and intensive revision of the previous generation with a quantum jump by its superior functionalities, accuracy and efficiency. Thanks to the new architecture, SideeX 3 was able to systematically support live cross-browser testing - users can directly and seamlessly replay the recorded test cases over modern browsers and platforms. Currently, more and more functions are being actively developed and continuously delivered.

The 3rd Generation of SideeX

Conclusion

The previous generation of SideeX has gained widely used in popular test automation communities. Now, it’s time for you to move forward to the new generation — SideeX 3.