Chrome DevTools are great for troubleshooting bugs, broken elements on pages, styling issues, responsiveness, identifying performance issues, third-party connections for data privacy, reviewing cookies and local storage, screenshots in different dimensions. Chrome DevTools are for technical users, so you do need to have a decent understanding of some basics like HTML and CSS to get started using them.
When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.
As one delves into DevTools, one encounters a gradually steeper learning curve. You can do a lot very quickly, but to fully utilize DevTools takes time as one explores what it can do.
With many new updates, tools and items are moved, and a comfortable workflow becomes a frustrating search. This often happens when following only slightly outdated tutorials on a given feature, even in Google's own documentation.
The experimental flags, settings, and options are scattered about and a little clunky to configure when one has to make changes in multiple places.
Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.
We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.
While Chrome DevTools are very powerful, it's not the easiest thing to use, as there are so many different tools built in. It takes some exploring to discover all the options possible within DevTools, but with a little exploring, the DevTools become a very powerful asset. Accessing the basic HTML and CSS inspection is very easy though, and that's the most common usage for the DevTools.
For those who are unfamiliar with coding, there is a bit of a learning curve. There is plenty of helpful documentation and resources but it can take a little time to get the software up and running. Once you get the hang of how Selenium works, and what it can do, you realize how many things you can use it for, and how many processes you can automate.
I'm not entirely sure what to rate the support for DevTools, because I don't have any experience dealing with official customer support for DevTools. I would guess the primary support for DevTools would be in a Chrome forum. Typically if I have a question or issue, I am able to find an answer from doing a quick Google search. It's pretty widely used, so it's not difficult to find answers.
The Selenium app has a pretty fat community of users. For the problems we are experiencing, we are primarily receiving support from these communities. In addition, there is widespread service support. Instant support is given to the problems we experience when we need Online support. We and our team are happy to provide this support, especially before important deployment processes
We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.
I find them pretty much the same, they have the same tools except Firefox doesn't provide the lighthouse functionality. I do prefer firefox's dark theme and colour palette. But I use Chrome Dev tools because of the Light house functionality that analyzes the page load and scores the website on desktop and mobile experience.
At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.
