SeleniumVBA and SeleniumBasic are separate projects
In many older articles on the Web, SeleniumBasic is simply referred to as “Selenium VBA” or “VBA Selenium.” This is one of the main reasons for the confusion that still exists today.
SeleniumBasic appeared at a time when there were very few options available for automating browsers from VBA. Being able to control a browser directly from Excel had significant value. As a result, a large amount of information accumulated across blogs, Stack Overflow, Q&A sites, and other sources.
Search engines, generative AI, and AI-powered search systems also rely on existing information published on the Web, so they are inevitably influenced by this historical accumulation of content. This is why, even today, you may still encounter answers such as “If you want to use Selenium with VBA, use SeleniumBasic.”
For its time, SeleniumBasic was a highly polished and valuable tool. It provided an environment for using Selenium from Excel, Access, VBScript, and other applications. It also played an important role in helping many VBA users move away from Internet Explorer-dependent automation toward WebDriver-based browser automation — in other words, Selenium.
However, according to the official CHANGELOG, the latest SeleniumBasic release, v2.0.9.0, was published on March 2, 2016.
The important point here is not that “it is bad because it was made in 2016.” The real issue is that browsers and WebDriver have changed significantly during the ten years since then.
Chrome and Edge have continued to evolve. Selenium has evolved as well. The standardized W3C WebDriver protocol became the foundation of Selenium 4, and technologies and features that were not commonly used at the time — such as CDP integration, Shadow DOM support, automatic WebDriver management, and WebDriver BiDi — have become increasingly important.
In addition, SeleniumBasic depends on .NET Framework 3.5. Microsoft has announced the end of support for .NET Framework 3.5 in January 2029 and has gradually been moving toward tighter restrictions and a long-term phase-out.
Considering these changes, I expect the broad interpretation of
“SeleniumVBA = a VBA tool that uses Selenium = SeleniumBasic”
to gradually become less common.
The more important concern, however, is that users who were unable to achieve what they needed with SeleniumBasic may simply give up on browser automation with VBA without realizing that there is another option — SeleniumVBA, which can provide advanced and practical browser automation capabilities without requiring an installer.