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Comment by lostintangent | Hacker News Reader

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.

Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

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Hi thanks for mentioning your project. Are there any plans to use it for automated UI testing for desktop apps? Selenium supports it (more or less) with WinAppDriver, which is another project from Microsoft.

https://github.com/microsoft/WinAppDriver

Desktop support is definitely on our long-term roadmap! We’re simply starting web, since it’s an area we think we can make big improvements to, before moving on to the broader developer landscape.

As we build out Playwright, we hope to learn a lot about how to make automation more reliable, ergonomic, and enjoyable for developers. Ideally, we could then apply those principles/learnings to desktop, mobile, etc. automation too. Stay tuned!

Might check out Sikuli

Looks promising ! although most of my problems (but not all) were related to environment and not Selenium itself.

> setTimeout-free automation

How ? you still need an upper limit for operations

Each of the page operations (e.g. click) automatically wait for the specified element to become visible before being performed. That way, your automation code is declarative about what you want to do, and to what element(s), and you can allow the Playwright framework to handle any “waits” on your behalf (without having to rely on time as a pseudo event).

To make the act of selecting elements more resilient to change, Playwright also supports a collection of “selector engines” that allow you to choose the best strategy for selecting elements (via CSS selector, xpath, text content). Additionally, you can author entirely custom selector engines, and compose them together with the built-in types. This is still somewhat experimental, but we think this can enable another level of robustness to test automation: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/master/docs/sel....

Finally, in addition to waiting for element visibility, Playwright allows you to wait for specific page events to occur (e.g. network request work made). This enables your code to leverage deterministic “signals”, not timeouts (which are the source of a lot of flakiness!). Overall, we want it to be possible to author automation that is entirely event-driven, and includes zero arbitrary timeouts.

What about smart selectors? First run uses defined selector but also saves othe attributes. If in next run element can be found by defined selector then those saved parameters are used to locate element.

Keen to check it out; the flakiness of Webdriver/Selenium I often wonder is more pain than it brings. So many sites I see disabling tests based on it because they sometimes work/sometimes don't, the hours that get plowed into it.

Edit: Missed the Microsoft ref. Not so keen.

Out of curiosity: why does the fact that Playwright is a Microsoft-sponsored OSS project discourage your interest?

The team is working very hard to be open/transparent/available (https://github.com/microsoft/playwright), and we’re very excited to build a better automation stack with the help of the community. I only ask since I’d love to hear any feedback for how we could improve the way we run/position the project. Thanks!

Check out https://www.cypress.io Been super happy with it!

Can you attach it to an existing browser window/session that is already open? Ie. I navigate and authenticate to a site, run code, and it continues from there with what's on screen?

Playwright allows you to connect to existing browser instances, but it currently requires you to get the “debug URL” of the browser instance first: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/v0.11.1/docs/ap....

I’d love to hear a bit more about the scenario you have in mind, since that might help inform some improvements we can make. Thanks!

The issue I'm having with Selenium (well, Watir with Ruby) is booting up some automated scraping logic for a page that may be in my current session once I've done the whole authentication dance manually (so I don't have to focus on automating that piece initially).

Ah this looks great. I'm super happy I'm learning about this project. Do you guys have any plans of adding extensions ala puppeteer-extra?

As part of our goal to enable better developer ergonomics, we’re very keen to explore “better”/higher-level APIs and additional extensibility points. For example, we allow you to define custom “selector engines” (https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/master/docs/sel...), which is just one example of the kinds of customizations we want to enable.

Out of curiosity: are there any specific extensions from puppeteer-extra that you’ve used and/or would be interested to see?

Looks great. The ones I use the most are probably: puppeteer-extra-plugin-block-resources puppeteer-extra-plugin-anonymize-ua puppeteer-extra-plugin-adblocker puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth (this the most heavily)

Cheers!

Thanks for the heads up! Selenium tests flakiness is definitely a big pain for us. I am also a big fan of the puppeteer api. We will check it out.

Great! Let us know if you end up having any questions/comments/feedback: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.

Just tried the examples on our site and it works really well! Amazing project!

PS: I remember interacting with you from the early days of code-push I think :)

Hey! I definitely remember you :) It’s always satisfying to run into the same folks across different projects, over the course of multiple years.

I’m glad to hear the examples worked out of the box! We’ve been iterating on the docs and API quite a bit (based on feedback), so don’t hesitate to let us know if/how they can be improved: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.

Any plans for a visual editor like Kantu?

Low/no-code authoring is definitely something we’re interested to explore. Once we’ve solidified the core Playwright library, we plan to build (and collaborate with the community on) tools that can simplify automation tasks even further, on top of a modern, reliable and performant core.

Are you currently using Kantu? If so, I’d love to hear more about your specific use cases, and which capabilities you’d be interested to see. Thanks!

Love the project, just installed it and trying it out now, got some nice results right away.

Awesome! Please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve. We want to make web automation not only more reliable, but also more enjoyable. So we’re keen to hear how we can continue to push that goal forward :)

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright

Plugging another alternative to the horrible Selenium made by two friends of mine! https://uilicious.com/

Just here to let you know the Selenium developers are human and read HN, too.

Don’t like the tool, didn’t say anything about the Developers. Not the finest choice of words though I agree.

Doesn't seem open source?

It’s not.

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