What are the Challenges and Limitations of Selenium?

Everything has its own ups and downs. Similarly, the most popular Automation testing tool Selenium also has its own pros and cons. In this article, I will discuss the Limitations of Selenium.

Selenium is an open-source tool which is mainly used for testing of a web application. It supports various programming languages, browsers, and operating system. Though it is one of the most popular automation testing tools, it has its own cons. You can learn more from the Selenium Certification Training.

Let’s discuss that with the help of below pointers.

I will be covering below limitations in this article. So let’s get started!

1. You cannot test the windows application

Selenium doesn’t support windows based applications. It supports only web-based applications which imply only website testing is possible with Selenium.

2. Mobile testing is not permitted

You can test on any operating system and browser on the desktop using Selenium, but you cannot deal with mobile testing using Selenium alone. To perform mobile testing, you can use Appium to handle iOS and Android native, mobile, and hybrid apps using the WebDriver protocol.

3. Limited reporting

With selenium, you couldn’t generate a good report. But with the help of TestNG, you can generate Extent reports.

4. Handling dynamic Elements

Some of the web elements are dynamic in nature. If an element’s ID is changing on every page load, then it will be a bit tricky to handle this in the normal way. We need to handle the dynamic elements with dynamic XPath or dynamic CSS selectors. Functions like starts-with, contains, ends with, etc. work well to handle dynamic objects. Know more about what is XPath with the help of XPath Tutorial.

5. Handling pop up windows

Windows-based pops are part of the operating system. It’s beyond Selenium’s capabilities. You can make use of AutoIT to handle the windows based popups.

6. Handling captcha

Handling captcha is a limitation in selenium. There are some third-party tools to automate captcha, however, you cannot achieve 100% results.

7. Image Testing is not possible

It is not possible to perform testing on images. To do so, you need to integrate Selenium with Sikuli for image-based testing.

So this was all about the Limitations of Selenium. With this, we come to an end of this article. I hope you understood the concepts and helped in adding value to your knowledge. Now, if you want to get more insights into Selenium, you can check out our other articles on Selenium.

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