Selenium WebDriver 2.0

What is selenium ?

Selenium is a set of different software tools each with a different approach to supporting test automation.The entire suite of tools results in a rich set of testing functions specifically geared to the needs of testing of web applications of all types. These operations are highly flexible, allowing many options for locating UI elements and comparing expected test results against actual application behavior. One of Selenium’s key features is the support for executing one’s tests on multiple browser platforms.

History:

Selenium first came to life in 2004 when Jason Huggins was testing an internal application at ThoughtWorks. Being a smart guy, he realized there were better uses of his time than manually stepping through the same tests with every change he made. He developed a Javascript library that could drive interactions with the page, allowing him to automatically rerun tests against multiple browsers. That library eventually became Selenium Core, which underlies all the functionality of Selenium Remote Control (RC) and Selenium IDE. Selenium RC was ground-breaking because no other product allowed you to control a browser from a language of your choice.

Webdriver 2.0 :

WebDriver is a tool for automating testing web applications, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that's easy to explore and understand, which will help make your tests easier to read and maintain.Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation.

Selenium webdriver can be used with diffrent browser and how it drives the browser means make native call to browser is entirely depends on the browser in use. Webdriver provides very easy to use APIs and can be configured with variety of programming language to write test cases. 

Webdriver can supports the following web browsers:
Internet Explorer,Firefox,chrome,safari, opera.

Languages you can use with webdriver are:
.Net,Java,Perl,PHP,Python,Ruby.

References:  Selenium