Selenium
A long-established browser automation framework that controls real browsers through the WebDriver standard, supporting many languages and widely used for testing and scraping.
Full Definition
Selenium is the original browser automation framework, originally designed for web application testing. It uses the WebDriver protocol (now a W3C standard) to send commands to browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge — from any supported language: Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, C#. For scraping, Selenium handles JavaScript-heavy pages but is slower and more resource-intensive than Playwright or Puppeteer due to the WebDriver protocol overhead. Selenium also has more conspicuous headless-browser signals (navigator.webdriver = true) that are easily detected unless patched. It remains widely used due to its maturity and extensive community support.
