Selenium is a popular open source, cross browser functional testing tool. You can learn more about it here. If you’re looking for functional testing solutions that use real web browsers, we strongly encourage you to take a look at Selenium.
We have a close relationship with Selenium: BrowserMob’s founder, Patrick Lightbody, was the original creator of the most popular version of Selenium, Selenium Remote Control. So it’s not surprising that BrowserMob utilizes Selenium technologies for both the record and playback of web traffic.
Because Selenium is a functional testing tool, it isn’t really meant to be used as a load product. There are two reasons for that:
- Selenium doesn’t capture and report the type of data that load testers want.
- Selenium uses real browsers, meaning you need a ton of hardware to simulate a load test.
BrowserMob solves both of those issues and has successfully turned a popular functional testing tool in to an excellent load testing tool. This has an added benefit that if you are already using Selenium for functional testing, you likely already have scripts needed to do load testing.
Selenium uses real browsers, meaning you need a ton of hardware to simulate a load test.
is this not a comfusing thing when Browsermob claims is using real browsers as it main benefit over the rest of apps doing the same?.
Hi, I’m trying to assess browsermob and it looks great. I love the idea of load tests based on selenium scripts but one concern and one question:
Concern: How come no reply to the question above from nik posted 4 months ago?
Question: Why don’t you offer htmlunit as another option which would reduce the cost cf firefox and provide full equivalent functionality (at least in theory) with the javascript support from rhino turned on. Does selenium RC which I guess you use not work with HTMLUnit/Rhino?
thanks and regards,
John
John,
We didn’t respond to nik’s comment because we don’t really understand what he’s asking. Yes, we do use a massive amount of hardware, and yes that is what differentiates us. We should have added a comment here back when he made his comment, but I believe we also received an email from him and continued the conversation there.
As for HtmlUnit, it is in our roadmap: we anticipate adding it this year. It will definitely bring the price down somewhere between our RBU and VU services. However, it will not really offer the same functionality as the RBU/Selenium-based service. For example, HtmlUnit doesn’t do concurrent threads for HTTP requests, it doesn’t allow for screenshots/movies, it doesn’t fully parse CSS and pull down all objects, and the JavaScript emulation doesn’t always work perfectly. But it is a pretty good alternative and we are excited to support it soon!
Patrick
Founder, BrowserMob