Question

What is the difference between Selenium 2.0 and Selenium 3.0?

Answer 1

The major difference between Selenium 2 and Selenium 3 is, Selenium 3 has bug fixes from selenium 2. Also, Selenium 3 is more mobile automation focused.

Here is the summary of the change from Official Selenium Blog.

• For WebDriver users, it's more of bug fixes and drop-in replacement for 2.x
• Selenium Grid bug fixes are done as well.
• Selenium project will not actively support only the WebDriver API.
•  The Selenium RC APIs have been moved to a “legacy” package.
• The original code powering Selenium RC has been replaced with something backed by WebDriver, which is also contained in the "legacy" package.
• Mozilla has made internals of Firefox browser more stable. So community provided Firefox Driver will no longer work. That means that from Firefox 48 you must use their geckodriver to use that browser, regardless of whether you're using Selenium 2 or 3.

src:

• https://saucelabs.com/blog/selenium-3-is-coming

• https://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/the-road-to-selenium-3/

 

Answer 2

On July 8, 2011, Selenium official blog made an announcement for the release of Selenium 2. Selenium 2 was built by integrating Selenium RC & WebDriver. WebDriver back then was a competitive & probably a more preferred web-application testing framework than Selenium RC. Wondering how? Well, WebDriver allowed testers to interact more closely with various browsers by controlling them directly through in-built browser extensions whereas Selenium RC ran a JavaScript Application inside a browser. Fortunately for testers, the developers from both the projects shook hands as they felt integrating Selenium RC & WebDriver could make the life of testers a lot easier. And so it was named as the Selenium WebDriver.

Since then Selenium 2 has been upgraded to a better and improvised version Selenium 3 & recently it got another upgrade Selenium 4.

The main difference between Selenium 2 and Selenium 3 is that now all the major browser vendors will provide their own WebDriver implementations (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla) in Selenium 3.0  instead of being developed by Selenium project (Selenium 2.0) and because they know their browsers better than anyone else, their WebDriver implementations can be tightly coupled to the browser, leading to a better testing experience for you.

To know more, refer to the original source: What Is Selenium? 

Answer 3

You can find list of bugs fixed here:

https://softwaretestingboard.com/qna/2363/what-fixed-between-selenium-webdriver-selenium-webdriver?show=2364#a2364