Selenium IDE Download And Installation – Step by Step Guide

Selenium IDE or SIDE is one of the most used FireFox add-ons and is the undisputed leader in the Web UI automation world. In this post, we’ll summarize the three quick ways to download and install the Selenium IDE add-on. This addon provides a test case development environment within the Firefox browser. It is like a magical drawing pen for the Software testers who are just beginning to learn the web UI test automation. It doesn’t require in-depth programming skills in Java, JavaScript or HTML. Instead, it allows to record, save and replay a test case on the fly. That’s why it is important to cover this topic. In the next section, you can read the Selenium ide download and installation steps and start your Selenium journey.

One important point you should note that this plugin currently supports FireFox. So the test scripts you would create with it will only work in FireFox browser. But there is a way to overcome this limitation; you need to export the scripts as WebDriver (Java) files. Later, you can create a Java project in Eclipse for WebDriver, add the files and change the WebDriver object to the browser where you want the test case to run. Please refer our post on the Selenium Webdriver project for a step-by-step example.

Selenium IDE Download And Installation Steps.

1- Download Selenium IDE from Seleniumhq.org.

You can download/install the plugin from the below link. It’ll show you a list of plugins related to the Selenium IDE. The first link from the list is the one you need to download. Its author is none other than the famous creator, developer, and blogger – Samit Badle.

Once you finish the above steps to install the Selenium IDE, FireFox will ask you to restart the browser. Just accept the popup and the browser will restart automatically.

2- Instant Installation of Selenium IDE from the addons.mozilla.org.

Here we bring you the second method for the Selenium IDE download. Use the below download link for an instant Selenium IDE installation into your browser. It is the official FireFox page to install the add-on we want. This page shows a count of the users who are using the Selenium IDE add-on. It gives the count as 50K+, but the actual size is much more than that number. However, you follow the below URL to head start with the installation of the Selenium IDE.

Let’s give you another source that lets you add the Selenium IDE 2.9.1 directly to your FireFox browser.

3- Install Selenium IDE from the command line.

Last of the method for Selenium IDE installation is through the command line. This approach works when you’ve downloaded the Selenium IDE add-on file or have a copy of the plugin saved to your system.

firefox -install-global-extension "<path-to-extension>\selenium_ide-2.9.1-fx.xpi"

echo "Command executed."

You can use the 2nd link from the method-2 to download the Selenium IDE extension file. You just need to right-click on the download button to open the context menu and click the “Save link as…” option.

So far, we’ve completed all the Selenium IDE download and installation steps. In the next section, we are going to present a brief overview of how to use the Selenium IDE.

How to start with the Selenium IDE?

You can use any of the following methods to start working with the web UI automation extension.

• After the Selenium IDE installation, there appears a button on the FireFox toolbar to open the Selenium IDE test-case designer. You can use that button to open the plugin window and start writing the test automation scripts.
  

  Selenium IDE download – FireFox Toolbar View

• You can open the Selenium IDE popup window from the main menu of the browser. Go to the Developer >> Web Developer >> Selenium IDE menu option.
  

  Selenium IDE download – Selenium IDE popup

• There are two keyboard shortcuts for launching the Selenium IDE popup window.
  • CTRL+Shift+s => It’ll open the Selenium IDE popup within the current browser window in a split view.
  • CTRL+Alt+s => It’ll fork a new Selenium IDE popup window separated from the browser.

Footnote.

Whatever data/statistics/links we’ve used in this post are the latest to date. So you can use them with full conviction. We wish that you would certainly have something to gain from this post.

In the future articles, we’ll cover the internals of Selenium IDE at full length. Also, we’ll keep this post up-to-date whenever there are changes in the Selenium IDE download or installation details we’ve referred here.

Best,

TechBeamers.