Drivers

How does Mink provide a consistent API for very different browser library types, often written in different languages? Through drivers! A Mink driver is a simple class, that implements Behat\Mink\Driver\DriverInterface. This interface describes bridge methods between Mink and real browser emulators. Mink always talks with browser emulators through its driver. It doesn’t know anything about how to start/stop or traverse pages in that particular browser emulator. It only knows what driver method it should call in order to do this.

Mink comes with six drivers out of the box:

• GoutteDriver
• BrowserKitDriver
• Selenium2Driver
• ChromeDriver
• ZombieDriver
• SahiDriver
• SeleniumDriver

Driver Feature Support

Although Mink does its best to remove browser differences between different browser emulators, it can’t do much in some cases. For example, BrowserKitDriver cannot evaluate JavaScript and Selenium2Driver cannot get the response status code. In such cases, the driver will always throw a meaningful Behat\Mink\Exception\UnsupportedDriverActionException.

Feature	BrowserKit/Goutte	Selenium2	Chrome	Zombie	Selenium	Sahi
Page traversing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Form manipulation	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HTTP Basic auth	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Windows management	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
iFrames management	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
Request headers access	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Response headers	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Cookie manipulation	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Status code access	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Mouse manipulation	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Drag’n Drop	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Keyboard actions	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Element visibility	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
JS evaluation	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Window resizing	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Window maximizing	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No