Selenium IDE, a popular Firefox add-on for test automation, will no longer be supported after Firefox 55. This document discusses potential alternatives to Selenium IDE, including Robot Framework, Protractor, and Katalon Studio. Katalon Studio is highlighted as a viable alternative because it has an easy installation, supports multiple browsers, and provides features like recording, reporting, and integration that are competitive with commercial solutions.

1. Top 3 Selenium IDE alternatives for Firefox & Chrome
Dear Selenium IDE’s users,
It was a bad news for the tester community since Selenium IDE no long works from Firefox
55 onwards. Selenium IDE is one of the most widely used automated testing tools ever,
this stop, therefore, raises a high demand in looking for other Selenium IDE alternatives.
Selenium IDE on Firefox’s add-ons site
Below are some potential successors of Selenium IDE. But first, let’s go back to the old
days of this excellent solution.
1. Selenium IDE history:
Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins in 2004
as an internal tool at ThoughtWorks. Huggins was later joined
by other programmers and testers at ThoughtWorks, before
Paul Hammant joined the team and steered the development
of the second mode of operation that would later become
“Selenium Remote Control” (RC). The tool was open sourced
that year.

2. In 2005 Dan Fabulich and Nelson Sproul (with help from Pat Lightbody) made an offer to
accept a series of patches that would transform Selenium-RC into what it became best
known for. In the same meeting, the steering of Selenium as a project would continue as a
committee, with Huggins and Hammant being the ThoughtWorks representatives.
In 2006, Selenium IDE was donated to Selenium Project by Shinya Kasatani of Japan. He
created Selenium as a Firefox extension that can automate the browser through a record-
and-playback feature. He came up with this idea to further increase the speed in creating
test cases.
In 2007, Huggins joined Google. Together with others like Jennifer Bevan, he continued
with the development and stabilization of Selenium RC. At the same time, Simon Stewart
at ThoughtWorks developed a superior browser automation tool called WebDriver. In 2009,
after a meeting between the developers at the Google Test Automation Conference, it was
decided to merge the two projects and call the new project Selenium WebDriver, or
Selenium 2.0.
In 2008, Philippe Hanrigou (then at ThoughtWorks) made
“Selenium Grid”, which provides a hub allowing the
running of multiple Selenium tests concurrently on any
number of local or remote systems, thus minimizing test
execution time. Grid offered, as open source, a similar
capability to the internal/private Google cloud for
Selenium RC. Pat Lightbody had already made a private
cloud for “HostedQA” which he went on to sell to Gomez,
Inc.
2. What is Selenium IDE? Why is Selenium IDE so successful?
Selenium IDE is a portable software-testing tool for web applications. It is open-
source Firefox add-on, web developers and testers can download and use it without charge.
Originally, Selenium IDE was supposed to be a rapid prototyping tool, which did not provide
iteration or conditional statements for test scripts. But it can offer different extension points

3. for users to enhance, via its own plugin system. Thanks to various plugins were
introduced over the time, Selenium IDE now becomes a comprehensive functional
automated testing tool.
Not only supporting record & playback function, Selenium IDE also offers other features:
scripting, debugging, reporting, etc. With the full set of most common functions, Selenium
IDE is a complete tool for testers to save their time working on the testing project.
Selenium IDE’s plugin page
It is stated by the Selenium team that the Selenium developers encourage best practices
in test automation that requires a certain amount of programming, with one of supported
programming languages. However, this contains the drawback: most testing frameworks
built on top of Selenium are quite developer-centric. Therefore, they need extra efforts to

4. install and configure programming language runtime and components before testers can
work on the project.
Because of that critical entry barrier and excessive learning curve, many companies prefer
commercial solutions with comprehensive features for automation testing
(like UFTor TestComplete), even these options are costly and the underlying engine may
not be as good as Selenium WebDriver.
Meanwhile, Selenium IDE is still the perfect choice for those who stick to Selenium. In
addition, for modest teams of test engineers with a small number of automated test cases,
Selenium IDE can also be utilized as an apart tool, which completely powers their
automation projects.
While being stable, Selenium IDE was built on Firefox’s add-on platform, which was fine at
that time, but not anymore since Firefox has lost if dominant position. The Chrome’s add-
on platform was totally incompatible with the Firefox’s, and without any resource, there has
not been a single attempt to port Selenium IDE to other web browsers.
When Mozilla decided to shut down the old add-on platform at the end of this year, it was
well accepted that Selenium IDE will no longer be around in the near future. And that test
engineers have to look for something else.
Mozilla’s announcement of its platform changes

5. Thanks to the great experience from Selenium IDE, Selenium no longer limits itself in the
community of developers, who are not in charge of testing. Instead, it becomes a magical
solution for software testers.
3. The viable Selenium IDE alternatives:
3.1. Robot framework:
Pros:
• Test cases are generated using keyword testing methodology written in a tabular
format.
• It also contains Robot Integrated Development Environment (RIDE), which helps
write test cases easily by offering framework specific code completion, syntax
highlighting, so on.
Cons:
• The complex installation, the lack of standalone test recorder tool, and a keyword-
driven language with a low level of descriptiveness.
3.2. Protractor:
Pros:
• Simple installation and updating. Within 1-2 command, both testing framework and
Selenium WebDriver will be installed nicely.
• The use of JavaScript, one of the easiest-to-use programming languages to learn,
especially for those to have limited programming background.
Cons:
• Protractor is too flexible but also unprepared. It requires experienced developers to
get involved before the team can start on it: set up the project and the proper
reporting plugin, and write Page Object scaffold.
• The Protractor team may mess with sync/async stuffs.

6. 3.3. Katalon Studio
Pros:
• Installation experience: users just need to unzip the package and they are ready to
start. No programming language runtime. No extra components or plugins required.
• The scripting interface allows users to switch between a keyword-base table and a
code editor. This is extremely useful for those who want to learn to write Selenium
test case on their own.
• Unlike Selenium IDE, the recording capability of Katalon Studio is powerful on major
web browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and IE.
• Katalon Studio can be considered a viable Selenium IDE alternatives since it
provides other convenient functions (reporting and integration) which are
competitive to paid solutions (UFT, TestComplete).
Cons:
• While web and mobile testing are very comprehensive, some users may want to see
more build-out in API testing module.
Read more: Best Selenium automation testing tools review: Robot Framework vs Katalon
Studio.
Conclusion:
Selenium and Selenium IDE have been great pieces of technology that critically changed
the automation testing history. Although Selenium IDE is no longer active, I believe great
developers will keep working on good Selenium IDE alternatives and make software testing
much better every day.