Browser automation standardization emerged from cross-stakeholder collaboration

So when I joined Mozilla - and I've been working on Selenium, I think, for about four years, by the time it became - we started talking about standards. And there was an interesting discussion. I was at a conference in Switzerland. So for the older listeners of this, there used to be a really cool conference called the Google Test Automation Conference, GTAC. And it used to be around the world. And one year, someone from Opera arrived. And he's like, "Look what I've built." And he had built Selenium into Opera. And we were like, "This is amazing. We think every company should be doing it that has a browser." Obviously, I've been doing a few things and I would read like specs and see how that related to my work. Because there'd be times where it's like, "Oh, we're adding this new feature," which normally came from a specification so that we could have interoperability between browsers. And I might help people create testing frameworks around that to make sure that they could test it. But there was never something that was like, "Here's a standard to build a testing framework into -" it was not a testing framework, an automation framework into the browser. And we started doing that. And it was a chap called Andreas Tolf Tolson, who then, about 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. He was at Facebook at the time once we got it really going. And yeah, we finally realized how important it was. Because when it came to how standar