Why do we need IEDriver and ChromeDriver but no Firefox Driver?

Question

I have small doubt.

Why do we need IEdriver and Chrome Driver running selenium scrits in IE and Chrome but we do not need a firefox driver to run the script?

Is there any reason for the same?

Answer 1

• This is because of the Native Browser approach used in WebDriver.
• Each and every browser uses different JS Engine.
• All drivers [Chrome Driver, IE driver, etc.,] are built based on the special JS Engine used by each browser.
• Selenium offers inbuilt driver for Firefox but not for other browsers. [Not sure it may happen in future, since TestNG and JUnit library files are a part of Selenium-standalone-server right now]

Answer 2

Straight from a google search for FirefoxDriver, the official documentation states:

Firefox driver is included in the selenium-server-stanalone.jar available in the downloads. The driver comes in the form of an xpi (firefox extension) which is added to the firefox profile when you start a new instance of FirefoxDriver.

Answer 3

External drivers are the preferred process by the Selenium developers. They allow the driver versioning to be tied more closely to the browser than to Selenium, and they can be supported by the browser authors (e.g., ChromeDriver, OperaDriver). There is a long-standing plan to replace FirefoxDriver with a Mozilla-supported driver based on Mozilla's "Marionette" architecture.

Answer 4

Firefox driver is already included in the selenium-server-standalone.jar package.