“A Smattering of Selenium #79” was a link roundup by Adam Goucher, published February 2, 2012—not a Selenium 79 release announcement. Its links ranged across test automation, Page Objects, browser virtualization, WebDriver, iOS techniques, and testing culture.
What “A Smattering of Selenium #79” means
The number 79 is the roundup’s place in a series of Selenium blog posts. Goucher introduced this edition with: “The only links left now are ones currently open in tabs right now.” The post collected resources he had open at the time; it was not a product changelog or a current news bulletin. Read the original Selenium post.
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What the February 2012 roundup covered
The post linked to a varied set of articles, presentations, and other resources. Its selection included:
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- Slides and a video from a November SFSE talk about continuous deployment at Mozilla.
- Practical Web Test Automation, which Goucher described as having free and paid editions at the time.
- Articles about software test automation and running Internet Explorer in a Mac virtual machine.
- PageMapper, described in the post as a template tool for Page Objects.
- A resource on Web Consistency Testing and an article arguing that automated tests should be taken “off the pedestal.”
- A presentation titled A Tool’s Tale.
- An article about monkey-patching iOS with Objective-C categories.
- An introduction to the software testing ice-cream cone.
- Goucher’s own post, WebDriver and Meta Tags.
These are the subjects and descriptions in the original roundup, not a verified list of current recommendations. The post’s mention of free and paid editions of Practical Web Test Automation records what it said in 2012; it does not establish present-day availability or format. Some outbound links’ current availability and contents have not been verified.
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Is Selenium #79 the same as ChromeDriver 79?
No. “A Smattering of Selenium #79” is the ordinal of a blog roundup. ChromeDriver 79 is a separately versioned browser driver. The two uses of 79 do not refer to the same release.
What Chrome’s historical notes say
Chrome’s ChromeDriver downloads archive lists ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.36 as supporting Chrome 79 and notes a fix for incorrect element-coordinate calculations relative to version 79.0.3945.16. The archive’s 79.0.3945.16 notes list fixes for crashes or lockups involving JavaScript alerts and a headless-mode “Element is not clickable” issue. These are historical release notes, not content from Goucher’s blog post and not guidance on choosing a current driver.
How to read the roundup in context
The edition offers a snapshot of topics its author was collecting in 2012, from test design and Page Objects to browser environments and testing culture. For current technical context, Selenium’s WebDriver documentation describes WebDriver as an interface for controlling a browser natively, locally or remotely. That current description should not be mistaken for an announcement made in the 2012 roundup.
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