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Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →A Smattering of Selenium #79 was a link roundup by Adam Goucher, published February 2, 2012—not a Selenium version 79 release announcement. Its links ranged from web test automation and Page Objects to browser virtualization, iOS techniques, and testing culture.
What “A Smattering of Selenium #79” means
The “#79” is the installment number of a Selenium blog roundup. Goucher introduced it with the line, “The only links left now are ones currently open in tabs right now.” The post collected resources he had open at the time; it did not announce a Selenium release. Read the original post.
What the roundup linked to
- Continuous deployment: slides and a video from a November SFSE talk about continuous deployment at Mozilla.
- Test automation: Practical Web Test Automation, which Goucher described as having free and paid editions, alongside articles about software test automation and taking automated tests “off the pedestal.” The post does not establish whether the book is available today.
- Page Objects and consistency: PageMapper, described as a template tool for Page Objects, and a Web Consistency Testing resource.
- Browsers and platforms: an article on running Internet Explorer in a Mac virtual machine, a presentation called A Tool’s Tale, and an article about monkey-patching iOS with Objective-C categories.
- Testing culture: an article introducing the software testing ice-cream cone.
- Goucher’s own contribution: WebDriver and Meta Tags.
This is a historical snapshot of the links and descriptions in the 2012 post, not a current recommended-reading list. The availability and present content of some linked pages have not been verified.
Is Selenium 79 the same as ChromeDriver 79?
No. In the title of the roundup, 79 is a blog-series installment number. ChromeDriver 79 is a separately versioned browser driver. Chrome’s official downloads archive records ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.36 as supporting Chrome 79 and fixing an incorrect calculation of element coordinates. The earlier 79.0.3945.16 entry lists fixes for crashes or lockups involving JavaScript alerts and a headless-mode “Element is not clickable” issue. Those are historical driver notes, not the subject of Goucher’s roundup; neither version should be read as current software guidance.
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How to read the post in today’s WebDriver context
The roundup is useful as a dated map of topics Selenium practitioners were discussing in 2012. For current technical context, Selenium’s WebDriver documentation describes WebDriver as an interface for controlling a browser natively, as a user would, either locally or remotely. That current description is separate from the wording and purpose of the 2012 post.
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