Selenium IDE uses a Chrome or Firefox extension to record your actions, but they're rewriting it to be an Electron app. I'm not sure about the status of that rewrite though.
But the benefits we have vs. what you experienced with Selenium IDE is:
- Instead of using an extension to record your actions, there's nothing to install to use Reflect. We spin up an instrumented browser inside a virtual machine and screenshare that with you within our web app. It records your actions and translates those actions into a repeatable test automatically.
- Since we have complete control of the test environment, we can do cool things like make recording file uploads really easy or present a nice workflow for getting coverage of visual regressions via screenshot testing.
- Our recorder is more accurate :)
- For every test you run within Reflect, you get a video synced up to the steps in your test, along with console and network logs from the test run.
- Instead of emitting Selenium code that you then maintain like a normal code-based testing tool, we are completely no-code meaning that even updating a test is completely codeless. So for example if you need to make bigger changes to an existing test, we expose a way to re-record only the portions of the test you want to change, and keep the rest as-is.
But the benefits we have vs. what you experienced with Selenium IDE is:
- Instead of using an extension to record your actions, there's nothing to install to use Reflect. We spin up an instrumented browser inside a virtual machine and screenshare that with you within our web app. It records your actions and translates those actions into a repeatable test automatically.
- Since we have complete control of the test environment, we can do cool things like make recording file uploads really easy or present a nice workflow for getting coverage of visual regressions via screenshot testing.
- Our recorder is more accurate :)
- For every test you run within Reflect, you get a video synced up to the steps in your test, along with console and network logs from the test run.
- Instead of emitting Selenium code that you then maintain like a normal code-based testing tool, we are completely no-code meaning that even updating a test is completely codeless. So for example if you need to make bigger changes to an existing test, we expose a way to re-record only the portions of the test you want to change, and keep the rest as-is.