[hugs]

"Are there any other major browsers taking a similar approach to Safari in terms of native WebDriver support?"

Let me tell you about the "world domination plan" for the Selenium project. In the beginning of the project, no browser had a good automation story. It was a constant battle to catch-up and fix things every time a new browser version came out. With Selenium 2, in addition to merging in WebDriver, the grand strategy was to move the maintenance of each browser driver codebase to the browser vendors themselves. Opera, Mozilla, and Google quickly jumped on board with the idea. To further this strategy, we moved Selenium's IP to a neutral 3rd party (Software Freedom Conservancy), and worked towards a W3C browser automation spec that looks suspiciously identical to the WebDriver API. Now with Microsoft and Apple also on-board, we can all raise our glasses and yell "Cheers!"

Of course, there's no rest for the weary. The battleground for good test automation tooling has now shifted from desktop to mobile (and possibly TVs, cars, watches, IoT, etc.)

[wickedlogic]

I wonder... Boss - "I see you expensed a Tesla" Me - "Yes, its for browser testing..."

[hugs]

You kid, but at some point over the years, I had that same epiphany: If you want a built-in justification to play with any new toy, pursue a career in test automation! (I don't have a Tesla, yet, but I'd be happy to be invited over to the test track to talk shop... But seriously folks... I'm very curious how they test the software running on their dashboard and center console.)

[lstamour]

Google's advice was always emulation--the tests running on dozens of Dell servers were faster and more reliable at bug hunting than physical hardware. Obviously there are limits, but the advice in 2013 was to prioritise automated tests in simulators instead of on real devices. Note the emphasis on automation, though -- you can totally expense that Tesla for the manual/acceptance testing ;-)

[wickedlogic]

Emulation, and specifically domain modeling, goes a wicked long way and has huge speed advantages in general.

[lstamour]

"But couldn't you run it in a VM?" ;-)

Then again, I can't actually find a VM for QtCarBrowser... short of downloading an old version of QtWeb presumably...

[hugs]

This is why there's a market for robots for testing -- real robots hitting real buttons. Especially in the automobile industry, no company wants to be hauled in front of the oversight committee in Congress after some horrible accident and when asked how they tested everything, they're only able to say "Well, all the tests passed in the simulator, so we went straight to production..."