Are any other major browsers taking a similar approach to Safari in terms of native WebDriver support? I saw this Microsoft blog [1] on Edge support of WebDriver, but it's not clear to me what approach they have taken (you still need to download a separate server for instance).

Only one Safari browser instance can be running at any given time, and only one WebDriver session can be attached to the browser instance at a time.

One downside to this approach is that it limits the ability to parallelize tests on a single machine for efficiency purposes.

1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/23/bringing-auto...

Let me tell you about the "world domination plan" for the Selenium project. In the beginning of the project, no browser had a good automation story. It was a constant battle to catch-up and fix things every time a new browser version came out. With Selenium 2, in addition to merging in WebDriver, the grand strategy was to move the maintenance of each browser driver codebase to the browser vendors themselves. Opera, Mozilla, and Google quickly jumped on board with the idea. To further this strategy, we moved Selenium's IP to a neutral 3rd party (Software Freedom Conservancy), and worked towards a W3C browser automation spec that looks suspiciously identical to the WebDriver API. Now with Microsoft and Apple also on-board, we can all raise our glasses and yell "Cheers!"

Of course, there's no rest for the weary. The battleground for good test automation tooling has now shifted from desktop to mobile (and possibly TVs, cars, watches, IoT, etc.)

Then again, I can't actually find a VM for QtCarBrowser... short of downloading an old version of QtWeb presumably...

The blog post doesn't mention iOS. Does anybody here know whether iOS Safari 10 will also support Webdriver?

>Safari on OS X supports WebDriver, which lets you automate web-content testing. It provides a set of interfaces to manipulate DOM elements and control the browser’s behavior. You can enable Remote Automation in the Develop menu and then launch the server using /usr/bin/safaridriver. For information about library integrations as they become available, see the information about Selenium WebDriver.

Notably, the "on OS X" bit. (Shouldn't that be on macOS? I thought "OS X" was done for!) Equally, you obviously can't launch the server using /usr/bin/safaridriver on iOS.

> Safari on _OS X_ supports WebDriver, which lets you automate web-content testing.

I don't see any mention of iOS in relation to WebDriver.

It's a shame we've been fighting this battle since the 1990s and are still fighting it.

Indeed, Safari is the only browser that doesn’t render my machine unusable under such use. (Both Chrome and Firefox seem to consume dramatically more CPU and memory for the same load.)

What kind of situation are you running into where it stops working after an hour?

How much memory do you have on your machine?

Just keep tabs open, they eventually start chewing up hundreds and hundreds of MB of ram each, and slowly grinds itself into the ground. Relaunch, it's snappy again.

However, I do know there are a handful of web app type things (Google calendar and possibly Gmail are coming to my mind) that seem to leak memory and cause issues if left open.

Edit: eridius mentioned Google Docs. I'm pretty sure that's what I was thinking of.

(Caveat: I haven't actually tried leaving a Docs page open for a day in a while. I stopped doing that when I discovered how badly it behaved. It's possible Google's fixed it, though I doubt it)

In addition, automation windows are shown with a different coloured bar and have a "pane" over the window so that it won't receive stray mouse or keyboard input.

I know this is a subjective opinion and I'm not going to touch upon whether I think it's true or not, but I want to know why you even said this bit? The common claims about Apple's quality slipping don't have anything to do with security. If anything, Apple's security is getting better and better over time.