The WebDriver protocol, and what it explains, Selenium Senior

The WebDriver protocol, and what it explains

Every Selenium behaviour, limitation and latency cost comes from the protocol. Knowing it turns guesswork into prediction.

What you'll learn

Why every command is an HTTP round trip
What the protocol can and cannot ever do
Why element references go stale

"Why can Selenium not tell me which network requests a page made?" is a question that sends people searching for an hour and finding only workarounds.

The answer is in the protocol, and once you know the protocol you stop searching for features that cannot exist.

WebDriver is a W3C standard, not a library. That is the fact everything else follows from.

Your test code does not control the browser. It sends HTTP requests to a driver process, and the driver translates them into browser-specific instructions.

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