Frequently Asked Questions
No, Selenium Box is a solution running inside your corporate network on your own infrastructure making it extremely secure and scalable. No external access to the application under test is required.
The fundamental difference between a cloud service and Selenium Box is that Selenium Box runs completely in-house or in your private cloud. This results in superior performance over cloud solutions and allows for much tighter integration into your surrounding systems such as CI, identity management and reporting. In addition you have better debugging, monitoring and reporting capabilities as well as greater stability and support for custom requirements i.e. self-signed SSL certificates, unlimited scaling option.
Building and maintaining your own Selenium Grid is complex and a high level of resources. The open source Selenium Grid provides basic functionality for running cross browser tests. However it is missing the scalability and enterprise level functionality which many organisations require today. With every new browser, driver and Selenium release, there is significant effort involved to ensure that the new browser versions are running properly in the Selenium Grid.
Selenium Box is a maintenance free solution, as the browser, driver and Selenium updates are managed by us. As a client, you can fully focus on building tests rather than test infrastructure. Selenium Box also provides enterprise level features like live view, video recording, access control via LDAP and more.
We support Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, MacOS Safari in the most recent and all older versions.
Yes. After a new browser or Selenium image is released to the Selenium Box, older browser versions are still available. Tests can be executed on the latest as well as older browser versions.
No. Selenium Box automatically downloads and installs new browsers, drivers and Selenium versions after they are tested and released by Element34. This makes the Selenium Box completely maintenance free.
No. Selenium Box uses the standard Selenium / WebDriver protocol without any modifications.
Selenium Box implements the standard Selenium / webdriver protocol. You can switch to another solution any time.
No, we do this for you. When we release new images to the Selenium Box, our customers can be sure that the versions are compatible with each other.
Yes. Selenium Box was designed to operate independently from outside access. Banks, insurances and security sensitive organisations are our main client base.
No. Each test is run in an isolated environment and does not share any resources with other tests. A new browser is started for each test. After the test finishes, the browser is closed and the environment is destroyed. Each test is completely isolated and there is no chance of side effects between browsers / environments.
Selenium Box is based on an annual or multi-year subscription.
Yes. Selenium Box has an advanced logging and monitoring mechanism, which can easily be customised and integrated into the customer environment.
Yes. Selenium Box has built in End to End HTTPS support.
After we conduct our tests, new images are usually released to the Selenium Box within 24-48 hours of the initial release.
Yes, Selenium Box fully supports the Appium protocol. You can run your tests on Android and iOS native apps, mobile web and hybrid apps.
No. You can run as many tests in parallel as your hardware resources are capable of. If you want to run more tests, you simply need to add more CPU / RAM to the Selenium Box system.
Most of our customers have a central Selenium Box instance running where the various teams connect into. Selenium Box is designed to handle a high load from various sources (i.e. CI system, developers).
No, all browsers (except OSX Safari) run inside the Linux host. You don’t need to provision and manage any Windows machines for running Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge browsers. This is one of our key technical advantages that we are able to run Windows browsers natively in a Windows OS inside Linux.
Running tests with OSX Safari is a built in feature of Selenium Box. Due to legal restrictions, tests on Safari require Apple hardware for the virtualization. The Apple hardware is then configured as an executor of the Selenium Box system and provides the same functionality as a Linux executor.
Yes. Access control and restriction are a built in feature of Selenium Box. If you are using an identity provider i.e. LDAP you can easily set up access groups and restrict the visibility of tests to a certain group of people.
No. Selenium Box is a software solution that runs on your corporate servers or in your private cloud.
No. You can run as many tests as you want. We don’t have access to your SBOX system and don’t care how many tests you run.
Selenium Box is a browser and mobile execution environment. The decision if a test is passed or failed is not taken by Selenium Box but rather by the client side (e.g. CI system). Therefore it makes most sense to use a client side reporting tool (e.g. Allure, Extent) to visualize the test results.
Selenium Box also provides an option to pushing the test results from the client to the Selenium Box. We however discourage this option in favor of client side reporting.
While this is enterily up to you (and may depend on your policies), you can run tests with any kind of data on Selenium Box. The test and test data never leaves your network with Selenium Box. Selenium Box runs completely inside your network and with that it is safe to run tests with production data.
Typically we see an increase of factor 3-5 in execution times when the same test is run on Selenium Box vs. a SaaS solution. This is because Selenium Box runs inside your network and is close to the rest of the CI / test infrastructure. Latencies are minimized and hence the significant increase in speed.
Background: Selenium / WebDriver is an HTTP based protocol which requires a roundtrip from the client -> server -> browser -> application under test and back for each command. When running on SaaS solutions the browser is running outside of the customer network with potentially large latencies in between.
No. You can run as many tests in parallel as your hardware resources are capable of. If you want to run more tests, you simply need to add more CPU / RAM to the Selenium Box system.
Selenium Box runs on any Linux system. Most of our clients run RHEL or CentOS. Selenium Box typically runs in one or more virtual machines but can also run on bare metal. We can provide detailed technical requirements upon request.
After new browsers are released by the browser vendors we thoroughly test that the browsers are compatible with the driver and Selenium versions. Once all the tests pass on our end we release the bundles to the Selenium Box installations. Selenium Box immediately picks up the newly released versions and makes them available for use.
Selenium Box is a fully self contained system. There is no effort required to manage the Selenium Box when running in auto-update mode.
Yes. Selenium Box integrates seamlessly with your corporate LDAP where you can define usage and access rights for your organization.
Yes. We fully support custom proxies based on your network architecture and requirements.
Yes, Selenium Box supports self signed SSL certificates.
Yes, Selenium Box is fully cloud compatible and can be run on physical servers, VMWare clusters, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc.
Yes. This is our recommended approach. Larger companies often have specific requirements in terms of infrastructure, network etc.
A proof of concept will give the certainty that Selenium Box satisfies your needs BEFORE purchasing. You will have a fully functional system available for evaluation. During the evaluation period you can run your own tests on Selenium Box to ensure that you are seeing the results that you are aiming for.
We will send you a detailed list of requirements for the proof of concept. On a high level, you need 1-2 Linux machines (VMs are ok) with 8 logical CPU cores each; 16 GB RAM per VM and 150 GB of disk space. We can send you scripts and documentation on how to check that you fullfill the requirements.
Yes. A video can be taken on a per test basis. The videos can be easily integrated into the reporting system or CI system.
Yes. Selenium Box provides a live view feature which allows you to watch tests in real time while it is running.
Yes. You can turn on manual interaction for your tests. This allows you to control the browser and debug your tests in more depth.
Yes. You can manually interact with the browser where the test is running. This also allows you to open a debug console and debug in real-time
Yes. You can see all the Selenium commands executed in the live view window.
Selenium Box provides a sophisticated report to analyze your tests while running or after completion of a run. At the same time, Selenium Box seamlessly integrates into your client system in case you already have reports set up and want to plug in the Selenium Box tests.
Yes. Because Selenium Box is hosted in-house it is no problem to also run tests with any supported browser against a build on your local machine.
Yes, you can also run Chrome in headless mode if you wish.