Selenium RC Issues as per my experience

I wanted to start this discussion by emphasizing on the effectiveness of Selenium RC for test automation of our web applications, but I am finding it difficult to pen down a paragraph not because it is not a very good tool and I had to materialize something to market Selenium RC but people already know so much about Selenium and you can find a lot of information about the effectiveness of Selenium RC and I do not want to repeat all that.

Therefore I decided to pen down some of the issues that we have faced while using Selenium RC and share the solutions where we find one and if some of you has better solution to these then please do not hesitate to share……Happy Sharing

1. Xpaths are very slow in IE so i prefer css locator. So Selenium IDE should record as css selector also because css locator is much faster than xpath for IE browser. But it records only as id locator or xpath locator. We need to convert those into css locator.

2. Selenium Rc does not support file upload/download pop ups. I am using AutoIt for providing these support with selenium.

3. Lack of built-in wait for ajax requests, we had to use a lot of custom waitFor statements based on the visual cues.

4. When i execute my tests on IE browser, few commands running very slow as :

• When any element is not present and i fire isElementPresent() command then it returns false very much slow. I can ten times slow than FF browser.
• I analyze that few commands like getValue, getAttribute running very slow.

Thanks