History

Minium was created in 2011 by Rui Figueira as a Java library on top of selenium WebDriver with two purposes:

Back in those days, WebDriver support for CSS selector was very poor under most browsers, and XPath was not an option whatsoever (c'mon, XPath on the Web, really?!), and after trying to replicate jQuery API using WebDriver API calls (which were very inefficient, because each method needed to communicate with the browser to get the corresponding elements), we found out that we could use WebDriver JavascriptExecutor to send javascript instructions to the browser and get both data and element references. That gave us an idea: why not sending jQuery to the browser and then use it to access web elements instead? That was what we did, and that gave Minium a huge power: