How does Webdriver / Selenium "talk" with your local web browser?

Question

For example, with FirefoxDriver, how does it send clicks and commands to a firefox instance?

Answer 1

This is achieved by having a web server in the Webdriver add-on for Firefox. Then the language bindings make a call like REST-ish to do something, such as clicks, text input, etc.

You can see the REST interface here . We call this the Json Wire protocol. We also have more native events through the advanced user interaction API . This makes more native clicks and text input at the OS level.

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