Selenium WebDriver carries out the automation using the native support of each browser. For this reason, we need to place a binary file called driver between the test using the Selenium WebDriver API and the browser to be controlled. Examples of drivers for major web browsers nowadays are chromedriver (for Chrome), geckodriver (for Firefox), or msedgedriver (for Edge). As you can see in the following picture, the communication between the WebDriver API and the driver binary is done using a standard protocol called W3C WebDriver (formerly the so-called JSON Wire Protocol). Then, the communication between the driver and the browser is done using the native capabilities of each browser.