Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, October 1, 2026
David Burns details the process of standardizing browser automation, explaining how the need for a consistent way to interact with browsers led to the development of WebDriver. He recounts early discussions at conferences and the challenges of standardizing concepts like 'element visibility' and 'meaningful waits' to avoid the halting problem.
“And we started doing that. And it was a chap called Andreas Tolfsson, who then about 18 months after that joined my team. And we started building out the specification, everything like that. And I was working very closely with Simon Stewart, who created WebDriver, to get the standard going.”
“The interesting problems came was like, when do you know that an element is actually on the page? Or how long do you have to wait?”
“When WebDriver started, Simon was like, When someone clicks on something, it needs to be visible. What does visible mean? Right?”