[gowan]

> Selenium IDE makes you handle timeouts manually which is a major inconvenience.

you can set the implicit wait setting. this will work in most cases but will make the tests slow when you need to test negative conditions. the behavior around implicit wait varies by driver implementation which can be annoying. in general it's better to use explicit waits.

> Selenium IDE only works with Firefox and may not work for sites or web apps that have slightly different DOM structure in Chrome, Safari, and IE.

selenium ide has webdriver playback[1]. if you don't like that you can generate webdriver scripts in c#, java, python, or ruby and run them against selenium server.

[1] http://blog.reallysimplethoughts.com/2013/02/18/webdriver-pl...

[koollx]

Screenster support for timeouts is much more extensive. It automatically determines the time it takes for the server to process each user action, it uses the visual baseline to wait for the right state instead of timing out or waiting too long.

Obviously you can do everything with WebDriver, Screenster uses it too. The point is that you can get a lot of benefits out of the box when you are using a highler level platform like Screenster vs hand coding to a low level API like WebDriver.

There's some description of Screenster features here http://screenster.io/selenium-alternatives-for-testing-autom...