What does Playwright do that Selenium can't do?
I'm pretty sure they have equivalent (or very close to that) functionality, in that anything you can do in Playwright can be expressed in Selenium and vice-versa.
But Playwright, from my experience, is much easier to use. The documentation is more comprehensive, and the API design is much more aligned with the kind of things I want to get done.
This is because Playwright has benefited from decades of experience in the space which started with Selenium. The engineers behind Playwright previously built Puppeteer, which was itself an evolution of ideas from Selenium.
Also Playwright is a general browser automation tool and can be used for more things than just testing. For example, scraping website data or generating preview thumbnails for URLs.
You can open multiple tabs within the same browser window, or you can create multiple WebDriver instances for multiple windows.
I think you're wrong there. See [1].
It doesn't use custom browser builds, but specific versions of official builds of mainstream unbranded browsers (you can also use branded ones if you wish). There are no "custom headless builds". All browsers support headless mode, and you can use it on your main browser by passing a CLI flag.
The reason it officially supports only specific versions is because there may be slight incompatibilities with the Chrome DevTools Protocol in each browser version, so they suggest running supported versions only. But like a sibling comment mentioned, you can also connect it to any existing browser instance, and, assuming there are no CDP incompatibilities, it will likely work.
Back in Windows-heavyweight app land, it made way more sense to interpose a low overhead shim to intercept and copy events.
I can't imagine the pain you'd encounter trying to paper over the other way around.
They do make some tasks tricky to handle, like tracking state, or avoiding race conditions, but in reality events are a good fit for interacting with browser DOM events, representing browser activity, and being able to react to it.
Consider the complexity of an average modern web site, that loads dozens of scripts, uses a frontend framework, is highly dynamic and interactive (likely a SPA), contains multiple frames, etc. All of this happens concurrently, and the only abstraction that makes sense to represent it is an event-based system. You can't achieve the same level of responsiveness using a traditional request/response protocol.
This is why modern browser automation protocols are event-based, and built on top of WebSocket. Selenium is pushing for WebDriver BiDi, while the browser standard is the Chrome DevTools Protocol.
Fully agree then. The only sane way to handle browser automation is by exposing all of them.
If it can only drive its internal browser engine, that'd possibly be a big argument against it for any test strategy I was architecting. I'd want the tests to be portable and usable cross-browser for acceptance--particularly UI-driven E2E tests, since that's really the only time they are critical.
The era of custom headless browsers like PhantomJS, or Selenium/WebDriver for that matter, is dead, IMO. The Chrome DevTools Protocol is the modern standard API to interact with a browser programmatically.
This does sound more promising then, if they've found new ways to add maintainability or QoL aspects to record/replay. As I said elsewhere, I think r/r gets a bad rap, and those sorts of improvements would increase the number of situations where it makes sense (at least for testing in incubation).
I do recommend giving it a try. The web browser automation landscape is much more reliable these days for writing E2E tests than back when Selenium was state of the art.
From what I can tell here are the benefits:
* With Playwright you don't need to put manual waits in your program. It's async.
* You also don't need to keep updating the Selenium.Webdriver to stay in sync with your browser version. This is a 15-20 minute time sink each time it happens.
* Can run in headless mode which will run the test suite much faster than selenium.
* Also appears to have better command line options to be run from a CI/CD environment
The webdriver issue is definitely annoying though. Not sure if there's a better way, but we're using a binary regex on the electron app in question to find a matching version and download it on the fly as part of test setup.
That is just choosing between a blocking method or... a blocking method which suspends and resumes a thread.
> headless mode
That is really up to the browser driver to implement that, and you can do that perfectly fine in Selenium.
> Playwright "records" your steps and even gives you a running Python script you can just directly use (or extract parts from). I'm serious about the running part- I can literally record a few steps and I will have a script I can then run with zero changes.
Does Selenium have that ?
However, regardless of the tech used, recording playback of HTML manipulation is pretty brittle - if you think adopting playwright because it has a record feature will save any kind of time/effort/money, you are in for a surprise. This is a feature everyone tries once and goes "wow, neat!" and then quickly realizes none of the suggested code is production ready, or even likely to work on a 2nd run for anything other than the most basic of static sites.
Selenium sucks