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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the story is there. Why wouldn't MS just have him continue to work on Puppeteer? They're both open source, so there's not much point in "owning" their own clone of it.

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I work at Google, but this is based on stuff I knew before I worked at Google, which I heard from a coworker. I haven't checked on the project since joining. The Puppeteer TL (the guy linked in the grandparent comment) apparently had ambitions to make Puppeteer work cross browser like Playwright does now. However, the Puppeteer project was heavily deprioritized and the TL would basically never be able to achieve their vision. This made it pretty easy for Microsoft to basically take the entire Puppeteer team from Google. That coworker of mine told me also that after all those Puppeteer devs left, Puppeteer is now basically only a 20% project worked on by a few people. The number of open issues/PRs done kinda reflects that (no idea of this is still true or not)

This is also my understanding.

I manage the team at Google that currently owns the Puppeteer project.

The previous team that developed Puppeteer indeed moved to Microsoft and have since started Playwright.

While it is true that staffing is tight (isn't it always), the number of open issues does not tell the full story. The team has been busy with addressing technical debt that we inherited (testing, architecture, migrating to Typescript, etc) as well as investing in a standardized foundation to allow Puppeteer to work cross-browser in the future. This differs from the Playwright team's approach of shipping patched browser binaries.

> The team has been busy with addressing technical debt that we inherited [...] migrating to Typescript

Wow, not writing stuff in TypeScript is now considered technical debt? I knew people were already rushing to rewrite everything in TypeScript if they could, but didn't knew we'd come this far along the hype-cycle already.

Perhaps because Typescript is a Microsoft baby?

GP manages puppeteer team at Google

Yes definitely. I've worked at two companies in three years spanning 250,000 employees and both companies consider writing JavaScript deprecated in favor of typescript.

I used Puppeteer on a project recently to generate some really big and complex PDFs that would have been a massive pain to do any other way, so thanks for your work, and I'm very happy to hear that the project isn't dead.

Glad to hear that. Puppeteer still has a number of compelling things over Playwright (like not shipping patched binaries) so I hope competition in this space can continue to happen :)

> This differs from the Playwright team's approach of shipping patched browser binaries.

Can you expand on that?

"Each version of Playwright needs specific versions of browser binaries to operate." [0]

They patch and compile browser binaries so they have the functionality Playwright needs.

Their build of Chromium is one release ahead of what's out but it looks like one could maintain a library of older Playwright browser binaries to test with. They probably have an older Firefox 91 binary that's feature-equivalent to the current Firefox ESR. Their WebKit builds won't ever be exactly the same as Apple Safari.

[0] https://playwright.dev/docs/browsers

From what I know puppeter works only with chromium, this could be deal breaker for microsoft

Edge is chromium though.

Microsoft's web products run on more than Edge.

They try very hard to stop you trying, though; Microsoft Teams has removed the “continue without the Teams app” button entirely on Firefox, even though I'm fairly sure it still works fine in Firefox.

I'm assuming you're not on macOS, right? Even though Firefox supports H.264, it's not really consistent outside of macOS because Firefox doesn't want to deal with patent hassles. This is true of Slack as well, some developers would actually support if Firefox has actually have decent support, but it's inconsistent outside macOS, where it can rely on Apple's good integration.

P.S. OpeH264 doesn't help mainly because it's decoding bugs, not encoding bugs.

> Even though Firefox supports H.264, it's not really consistent outside of macOS because Firefox doesn't want to deal with patent hassles.

That's only a concern for video chats. Teams does a lot of other stuff too, and there's no reason you shouldn't be able to use that on Firefox.

You get the same message from macOS Firefox.

Puppeteer has experimental Firefox support.

https://pptr.dev/#faq:~:text=What%20is%20the%20status%20of%2...

I think that has been the case for a very long time.

I'm exaggerating but Playwright vs Puppeteer is a bit like comparing Puppeteer with Selenium

Not at all true

I don't really have a horse in this race, but based on the thread, why would this be wrong. Are any of these automation frameworks really different? What would be the differences? When would I use one versus the others? Especially why would I use puppeteer if it is a dead project as implied?

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