Selenium 3 has moved out of Beta release and you can now download Selenium WebDriver 3.0.1 from SeleniumHQ website. The last beta version that was available for Selenium 3 was Selenium 3.0.0-beta4. The first stable release for Selenium 3 was Selenium 3.0.0 and Selenium 3.0.1 has been available a few days after that.
If you are just starting with learning automation testing with Selenium, then I would suggest that you start with the latest version of Selenium 3. You can follow the steps given in this article – Download and Install Selenium WebDriver, to download and setup Selenium 3. Please note that the some of the screenshots given in this article might point to the an older version of Selenium, but all the steps mentioned in the article are valid for the latest version of Selenium.
Updating your existing Selenium Scripts/Framework to Selenium WebDriver 3.0.1
If you are already working on previous versions of Selenium, especially with any Selenium 2.x version, then upgrading to Selenium 3.0 is pretty straightforward. You can download the latest JAR files from SeleniumHQ downloads page. If you are using pom.xml, then you can update it to point to Selenium 3.0.1 like this –
org.seleniumhq.selenium
selenium-java
3.0.1
Run your test cases with the latest version of Selenium 3.0. You would mostly not find any issues with the scripts as such.
Selenium WebDriver 3.0.1 and Firefox
One more important point to keep in mind if you are using Selenium 2.x and Firefox is that with Selenium 3, support for Firefox is provided via Mozilla’s geckodriver. Follow the steps given in this article – Selenium 3 and Firefox with GeckoDriver, to start using Firefox with GeckoDriver. You can also refer this link to check the new features that have been added in the newer version of Selenium 3 – Selenium Java Changelog
Try out Selenium 3.0 and let us know how it works. Let us know using the comments section if it worked well for you or if you faced any issues while upgrading to the latest version of Selenium.