# What is Selenium? | SoftGlaze Browser glossary

> Selenium is the open-source automation project built on the W3C WebDriver standard. How it works, its drivers and Grid, and how it relates to SoftGlaze.

- Canonical URL: https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary/selenium
- Last updated 2026-11-07

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[Automation and AI](https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary?category=automation-and-ai)

## Selenium

Also called Selenium WebDriver, ChromeDriver, Selenium Grid, WebDriver BiDi, undetected chromedriver

Definition

Selenium is an open-source browser automation project whose WebDriver libraries control Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari through each browser's driver, using the W3C WebDriver standard.

Last updated 7 November 2026

### How it works

Your test code, in Java, Python, C#, JavaScript, Ruby or another supported language, talks to a driver program for each browser: ChromeDriver for Chrome, msedgedriver for Edge, geckodriver for Firefox and safaridriver for Safari. The driver turns WebDriver commands into actions in the browser. Selenium Grid spreads tests across many machines and browsers. WebDriver BiDi, a newer two-way version of the standard, adds events such as console messages and network activity that the original request-and-response protocol lacked.

Because Selenium follows the WebDriver standard, a browser it drives reports `navigator.webdriver` as `true`, and ChromeDriver starts Chrome with its automation switch by default.

### Why it matters when you run several accounts

Selenium was designed for testing your own sites in clean, repeatable browsers, and it does that well. The same design makes a Selenium-driven browser easy to identify as automated, which matters on sites you don’t control. Using it for real accounts means attaching it to a browser that has the account’s own profile rather than launching a fresh one.

### How SoftGlaze Browser handles it

SoftGlaze Browser has no Selenium integration of its own. It drives Chromium profiles over the Chrome DevTools Protocol through Puppeteer, and its local API returns a running profile’s DevTools WebSocket address for code that attaches that way. Its built-in options are no-code macros, parallel runs and, in the next release, SoftGlaze AI (Beta).

### Sources

1.  [Selenium WebDriver documentation](https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/) Selenium
2.  [WebDriver (W3C Recommendation)](https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver2/) W3C
3.  [WebDriver BiDi (W3C draft)](https://w3c.github.io/webdriver-bidi/) W3C

Outside sources were checked in November 2026. Browsers, standards and vendors' pages change, so details that depend on them are as of that month.

### Related terms

-   [navigator.webdriver](https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary/navigator-webdriver) navigator.webdriver is a browser property that the W3C WebDriver standard requires to be true when the browser is under automated control, so a page can tell an automated session from a person using the browser.
-   [Puppeteer](https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary/puppeteer) Puppeteer is an open-source JavaScript library from Google's Chrome team for controlling Chrome or Firefox from code, through the Chrome DevTools Protocol or WebDriver BiDi.
-   [Playwright](https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary/playwright) Playwright is an open-source browser automation library from Microsoft that controls Chromium, Firefox and WebKit from one API, available for JavaScript, Python, Java and .NET.
-   [Browser automation](https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary/browser-automation) Browser automation is software controlling a web browser the way a person would, opening pages, clicking, typing and reading results, either from code, from a recorded macro or from an AI app.
-   [Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP)](https://browser.softglaze.com/glossary/chrome-devtools-protocol) The Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) is the interface Chromium-based browsers expose for debugging and control, a set of commands and events sent as JSON over a WebSocket, which DevTools, Puppeteer and many automation tools use.

### Read more on this site

-   [Docs: automation](https://browser.softglaze.com/docs/automation)
-   [Automation](https://browser.softglaze.com/features/automation)

### See it in SoftGlaze Browser

Separate profiles, each with its own cookies, device values and proxy, on Windows. Try the app's screens in your browser first, or start the free trial; no card needed.

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