Describing "2011–2017" as "the dark ages" makes me feel so old.
There was a ton of this stuff before Chrome or WebKit even existed! Back in my day, we used Selenium and hated it. (I was lucky enough to start after Mercury...)
There was a ton of this stuff before Chrome or WebKit even existed! Back in my day, we used Selenium and hated it. (I was lucky enough to start after Mercury...)
having to add ids to elements is one of those classic tradeoffs -- the alternative was to use css or xpath selectors, which can be even worse, maintenance-wise. i'm secretly hoping ai code-gen apps pumped out by things like Lovable or Claude Code automagically generate element test-ids and the tests for you and we never have to worry about it again.
that might not matter if the agent is re-finding the element between sessions anyway, but then you're paying a lookup cost (time + tokens) each time. compared to just using document.getelementbyid() on an explicit id.
we cant modify the dom to add IDs because we'd get detected by block-blockers very quickly. we're gradually trying to get rid of all DOM tampering entirely for that reason.
We had a complex user registration workflow that supported multiple nationalities and languages in a international bank website.
I setup selenium tests to detect breakages because it was almost humanly impossible to retest all workflows after every sprint.
It brought back sanity to the team and QA folks.
Tools that came after certainly benefitted from selenium lessons.
I still deeply appreciate these tools, even though I also find them a bit frustrating.
fun-fact: i've never used mercury. when i came up with "selenium" -- it was because a colleague saw an early demo and said it had the potential to "kill mercury". (spoiler alert!)
but in that moment, i hadn't heard of mercury before, so i had to google it. i then also spent a few extra cycles googling around for a "cure for mercury poisoning" just so i could continue the conversation with that colleague with a proto-dad-joke... and landed on a page about selenium supplements. things obviously got out of hand.
i didn't want to call the project "selenium". i preferred the name "check engine", but people started calling it "selenium" anyway. i only wish nice things for the mercury team -- the only thing i know about them is that hp acquired mercury for $4.5B. so i hope they blissfully don't care about me or my bad dad-jokes.
but again... i didn't realize there was an entire testing tools industry at that moment. all i knew was that i had a testing problem for my complicated web app -- and the consensus professional advice at the time was "yeah, no. don't use javascript in the browser -- it's too hard to test". (another spoiler.) also, (if i'm remembering correctly) mercury was ie/windows only... and i needed something that supported apple and mozilla/firefox. it felt like zero vendors at the time cared about anything that wasn't internet explorer or wasn't windows. so i had to chart my own course pretty quickly.
long story long: "you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" - harvey dent
Ha! Yeah, it's no worries at all, I think it's fine to not like things. Everybody is different. And for these sorts of things, it's kind of a "there are two kinds of tools, the ones people complain about, and the ones they don't use" sort of situation: if I didn't think it was valuable, I just wouldn't use it. But it's valuable enough to use despite the griping at times.
Thank you for the story!
https://github.com/browser-use/website/blob/main/posts/playw...