Robot Framework, why does it need more web drivers for other browsers?

Question

Selenium is a web driver itself so why do I then need to download browser-specific drivers? Does Selenium only natively support Firefox and therefore need them to "translate" so that it understands or?

Sorry to be vague but I am genuinely confused by this.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Selenium is not a webdriver. Selenium is the name of the project that encompasses webdriver and other software. The whole point of selenium/webdriver is that it doesn't know about any browsers. The point of the driver is to allow selenium to use an abstract interface, and then browser-specific modules can be installed to provide a concrete implementation of the interface for a specific browser. The design of selenium thus requires a driver for every browser that you want to automate.

That being said, selenium comes with a some drivers pre-installed, so you only have to install additional drivers if the browser(s) you are testing that are not part of the default set.

For more insight into why it's good to be able to download other drivers, see this blog post from one of the selenium contributors: Are you kidding me, IE Driver? Another freaking thing to download?

(thanks to @JimEvans for some comments that I've incorporated into this answer)