The Selenium Glossary includes the following:
- Selenium IDE: This is a browser plugin that records user activity inside the browser with Selenium commands, which can be used to create test cases. The test cases can be played back afterwards, as a part of the test suite. As a starting point, it is useful to create test cases and to learn the Selenium syntax.
For more information on the Selenium IDE, you can visit https://seleniumhq.github.io/docs/quick.html#selenium_ide.
- Selenium WebDriver: This is an API that provides a simple interface to interact with browsers in a programmatic way. This book mainly focuses on WebDriver; more details are provided at https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/.
- Selenium Grid: This enables your team to run tests in parallel, across different machines (physical or virtual). On each machine, there can be various browsers (in different versions) and different operating systems. More information can be found in the last chapter of this book, as well as at https://seleniumhq.github.io/docs/quick.html#selenium_grid.
Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on that allows for recording and playing back the execution of a script. The original IDE is no longer maintained, and, from Firefox 55, it does not work anymore. A new IDE (IDE2) is currently under development, in a "Work in Progress" status. Nevertheless, Selenium IDE is not recommended for middle-and long-term, maintainable testing code.