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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute“A Smattering of Selenium #78” is a community link roundup published on February 1, 2012—not a release announcement for Selenium version 78. Adam Goucher’s post, introduced with “Look! A light at the end of the tunnel!”, collected links on early Selenium and WebDriver practice, from test infrastructure to mobile automation. It is best read as a snapshot of the discussions developers were having at the time.
What was in Selenium Smattering 78?
Goucher’s roundup was a short, curated set of links and observations rather than a single tutorial or systematic review. Its topics show the range of work around Selenium and WebDriver in early 2012:
- ASP.NET MVC, Selenium, and IIS Express: a how-to for a Windows-based setup, which Goucher noted was less commonly covered in the tutorials he encountered.
- Machine-readable logs: a proposal to write logs in JSON, along with the possibility that continuous-integration (CI) containers might share a convention for consuming JSON output.
- Remote file uploads: a discussion of using Selenium 2’s
FileDetectorsfor file uploads in remote-driver scenarios. - CI infrastructure: a link about Janky, described in the post as GitHub’s CI server, alongside the observation that some teams chose to build their own CI system.
- Test design: advice on moving from dependent tests toward independent tests and independent assertions.
- CSS selection and DOM traversal: an approach that injected the Sizzle selector library into WebDriver scripts, with WebDriver Plus DOM traversal presented as an alternative.
- Java packages on Ubuntu: a notice concerning packages relevant to running Selenium Server.
- Hosted testing: a post about running Selenium on ShiningPanda, which Goucher compared to CloudBees for Python.
- Mobile automation: a post about the WebDriver iOS driver.
- Cookies: Goucher’s own post, “WebDriver and Cookies.”
These descriptions reflect the original post’s terminology and context. The roundup’s links are historical leads; a linked service, code sample, or page may have changed or disappeared since publication. The post does not establish whether those offerings remain available today. Read the original roundup.
What the roundup says about Selenium’s development at the time
The links capture practical questions surrounding browser automation: how to make test infrastructure easier to integrate, how to handle files and selectors in remote WebDriver scripts, and how to write tests that do not depend on one another. They also show that Selenium-related work was not limited to browser commands; teams were discussing CI systems, operating-system packages, and mobile drivers alongside test code.
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The roundup raises a few contrasts, but it does not provide benchmarks or a controlled feature comparison. JSON logs are discussed as a possible shared convention rather than a demonstrated replacement for every ad hoc format. Janky appears in the context of teams choosing between an existing CI service and building infrastructure themselves. Sizzle injection and WebDriver Plus traversal are mentioned as different ways to work with page elements, without measurements establishing one as universally better.
Why “78” does not mean Selenium version 78
The number belongs to the roundup’s title: it is installment 78 in the “A Smattering of Selenium” series. The February 2012 article is not documentation for a Selenium 78 release. Selenium’s official project release stream is separate and continues much later; the official releases archive lists Selenium 4.49, while the project’s Selenium 4.48 announcement is dated August 27, 2026.
Using this post today
For historical context, the roundup is useful as a compact record of issues Selenium practitioners were exploring in 2012. For current implementation decisions, treat each link as a starting point rather than current guidance: confirm that the destination still exists and check present-day Selenium documentation and project release information before adopting an old API, service, or workflow.
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