BiDirectional functionality

Selenium is working with browser vendors to create the WebDriver BiDirectional Protocol as a means to provide a stable, cross-browser API that uses the bidirectional functionality useful for both browser automation generally and testing specifically. Before now, users seeking this functionality have had to rely on CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) with all of its frustrations and limitations.

The traditional WebDriver model of strict request/response commands will be supplemented with the ability to stream events from the user agent to the controlling software via WebSockets, better matching the evented nature of the browser DOM.

As it is not a good idea to tie your tests to a specific version of any browser, the Selenium project recommends using WebDriver BiDi wherever possible.

While the specification is in works, the browser vendors are parallely implementing the WebDriver BiDirectional Protocol. Refer web-platform-tests dashboard to see how far along the browser vendors are. Selenium is trying to keep up with the browser vendors and has started implementing W3C BiDi APIs. The goal is to ensure APIs are W3C compliant and uniform among the different language bindings.

However, until the specification and corresponding Selenium implementation is complete there are many useful things that CDP offers. Selenium offers some useful helper classes that use CDP.