14. Selenium WebDriver Architecture & W3C Protocol

Selenium Architecture (Selenium 4 W3C Standard)

In Selenium 4, the test code directly communicates with browser drivers (ChromeDriver, GeckoDriver, msedgedriver) using the W3C WebDriver Standard over HTTP, eliminating the legacy JSON Wire Protocol overhead.

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
public class FirstSeleniumTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // WebDriver initialization in Selenium 4 (Selenium Manager auto-handles driver binaries):
        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
        try {
            driver.get("https://targetqa.com");
            System.out.println("Page Title: " + driver.getTitle());
        } finally {
            driver.quit(); // Always quit browser session
        }
    }
}