How to move back and forward in History using Selenium Python ?

Selenium’s Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provides a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. To open a webpage using Selenium Python, checkout – Navigating links using get method – Selenium Python. Just being able to go to places isn’t terribly useful. What we’d really like to do is to interact with the pages, or, more specifically, the HTML elements within a page. There are multiple strategies to find an element using Selenium, checkout – Locating Strategies. Selenium WebDriver offers various useful methods to control the session, or in other words, browser. For example, adding a cookie, pressing back button, navigating among tabs, etc.

This article revolves around driver methods to move forward and backward in Selenium to move backward and forward in browser history. The two major methods used are –

back driver method

back method is used to go one step back in browser history.

Syntax –

driver.back()

Example –
Now one can use back method as a driver method as below –

driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")
driver.back()

To check individual implementation of back method visit – back driver method in Selenium Python.

forward driver method

forward method is used to go one step forward in browser history.

Syntax –

driver.forward()

Example –
Now one can use forward method as a driver method as below –

driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")
driver.forward()

To check individual implementation of forward method visit – forward driver method in Selenium Python.

How to use back and forward driver methods in Selenium Python ?

To demonstrate these methods of WebDriver in Selenium Python. Let’ s visit https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ and operate on driver object.

Program –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver

# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")

# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.practice.geeksforgeeks.org/")

# one step backward in browser history
driver.back()

# one step backward in browser history
driver.forward()

Output –
Browser goes backward in history as verified below –

Then, browser goes forward in history as verified below –