Project News: WebdriverIO ships v6

Kudos to the WebdriverIO team for their recent v 6 release. Webdriver, a hosted project at the OpenJS Foundation, is a Next-gen browser automation test framework for Node.js. 

Big updates include:

Drop Node v8 Support
WebDriver has dropped support for Node v8, which was deprecated by the Node.js team at the start of 2020. It is not recommended to run any systems using that version anymore. It is strongly advised to switch to Node v12 which will be supported until April 2022.

Automation Protocol is now Default
Because of the great success of automation tools like Puppeteer and Cypress.io it became obvious that the WebDriver protocol in its current shape and form doesn’t meet the requirements of today’s developer and automation engineers. Members of the WebdriverIO project are part of the W3C Working Group that defines the WebDriver specification and they work together with browser vendors on solutions to improve the current state of the art. Thanks to folks from Microsoft there already proposals about a new bidirectional connection similar to other automation protocols like Chrome Devtools.

Performance Improvements
A big goal with the new release was to make WebdriverIO more performant and faster. Running tests on Puppeteer can already speed up local execution. Additionally, v6 has replaced the heavy dependency to request which has been fully depreciated as of February 11th 2020. With that, the bundle size of the webdriver and webdriverio package has been decreased by 4x.

These are only a few things that the v6 release brings. Read the full blog on the WebdriverIO site.