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“A Smattering of Selenium #98” is a historical link roundup published by Selenium project blogger Adam Goucher on July 2, 2012—not a Selenium release announcement or present-day compatibility guide. Its links capture the community’s concerns at the time, from moving tests off Selenium RC to synchronization, CI speed, browser and mobile support, JavaScript, and time-dependent test data. Read the original post.
What the 2012 roundup covers
Goucher opens with “Happy day off Canuckistan!”, a Canadian holiday aside, then curates links with short comments. The post is useful as a snapshot of what Selenium practitioners were discussing—not as verification that every linked claim held up, or as advice for current Selenium versions.
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Migration and test reliability
The roundup links “Selenium Rc to Webdriver Migration – Part2,” calling attention to its Internet Explorer section. The migration article itself could not be independently checked here, so the roundup establishes its title and Goucher’s pointer, not the completeness or current applicability of its steps.
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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Goucher also offers two brief reliability reminders. On SSL certificates, he writes: “Busted SSL certificate? Don’t work around the problem — fix it!” For a missing element, he points to synchronization as the issue to examine. These are concise editorial warnings, not a full troubleshooting procedure: the post does not specify a synchronization strategy or diagnose a particular test failure.
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CI speed and test selection
A linked Crashlytics headline reads “Scaling Continuous Integration – Cutting Test Time by 77%.” The figure is part of that headline as presented in the roundup; the original page could not be retrieved for verification, and the roundup supplies no test conditions or methodology. Treat it as an attributed historical headline, not an independently established benchmark. Goucher’s accompanying comments look toward dynamic test selection and parallelization as possible directions for CI tooling.
Browser and mobile compatibility
The post asks, “Does WebDriver support Jelly Bean yet?” This is a question posed in 2012, not evidence of Android Jelly Bean support then or guidance about current Android and browser compatibility.
Rank #2
JavaScript and BDD
Goucher links a discussion of jQuery Core 1.9 and beyond and a Cucumber presentation titled “Myth #2 of Cucumber: It’s about Talking not Testing.” He speculates that WebDriver should be immune to jQuery changes, while qualifying that view. The post therefore records a concern and a tentative opinion; it does not establish universal compatibility between WebDriver tests and changes to page scripts.
Other links in the collection
The roundup also points readers to material about Unicode encoding, cloud-powered CI/CD architectures, responsive images, and Delorean, a Ruby library for changing perceived time in scripts. These links show how broadly the roundup ranged beyond WebDriver itself. Delorean’s repository now labels the project discontinued and no longer maintained: check the repository status before treating it as a usable dependency.
How to read it today
- As history: It documents topics and questions circulating in the Selenium community in July 2012.
- As a trail of sources: The post preserves the titles and destinations of links worth investigating, but several linked pages—including the migration, CI, and Cucumber material—could not be checked here.
- Not as current setup guidance: The roundup predates today’s browser, mobile, and Selenium releases. Verify compatibility and implementation details against current project documentation before applying them.
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