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Comment by hugs | Hacker News Reader

> I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now

i'll politely pushback a little. i think it's safe (at this moment in time) to say: playwright wins the first derivative, but selenium wins the "area under the curve". selenium is very entrenched in many parts of the world, especially outside of SF/USA. part of the inbound interest i've been getting for vibium is from those selenium users who want some kind of bridge to the future, but didn't have an obvious path forward beyond "dump selenium, adopt playwright"...

part of my plan with vibium post-v1 is to give that massive (and it truly is massive, i'm not bragging) installed base of selenium users an upgrade path to more agentic coding options.

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Are you solo developing vibium ?

Playwright really simplifies getting setup. It won't work for everyone, but within 30 seconds Playwright will download it's needed browsers along with a test runner.

I also find the documentation is much better/consolidated.

Definitely open to helping you out if I can be of assistance.

"npm install vibium" installs the needed browser on install.

right now, code-wise -- for the code you see in github at the moment -- it's just me and my ai pal, claude. but there's a growing cast of (human!) characters also helping with all the other things we need to do to run a successful project. patches and tokens welcome!

Would you suggest Vibium as ready for production use?

On second thought not being controlled by Microsoft might be good enough to differentiate it from playwright. It's not a good idea for a single company to control so much.

I'm thinking their needs to be an easy way to sandbox vibe automation. I don't want to accidentally click an ad and vibe test an unrelated website .

it's just v1. good for experimenting, not for production (yet!).

and yes, it's perhaps impolite and silently taboo for me to say it out loud, but "not being controlled by microsoft" is on the top 10 list of "why vibium and not playwright". most of the sf world has gone all-in on playwright; i'm betting on web standards. i hope people will notice that distinction. however, i realize vibium can't win just as the "not microsoft" option; it will also need to win on the merits.

microsoft is already incredibly well-positioned to own the whole dev stack. from their investment in openai to vscode, github, and playwright... they are in a powerful position. i'm old enough to remember the last time ms had massive power over the stack (see: internet explorer 6).

Not to mention they own NPM( GitHub owns NPM).

C# is fantastic and Playwright's C# support is extremely good. I've been in the C# ecosystem for years, but I'm still a bit worried about having a single company control so much of my livelihood. Let's just say I have a little bit of experience with Microsoft, they don't particularly pay well so I'm a little confused as to if they can maintain so many frameworks indefinitely.

Are you going to keep Vibium a community project, or you hoping to raise capital/bootstrap.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love what you're doing but I don't know if one person can create something so complex. The good news is Chrome is the only browser most normal people use, which reduces the amount of testing you have to actually do.

At the vast majority of places I've worked at we basically just test on Chrome and then if it doesn't work on other browsers ohh well. Every now and then you would get a project manager who would suggest adding Firefox/Safari testing. But it's never been a priority.

So it's vibecoded?

it's named vibium for a reason.

Selenium is distinctly more popular among scientists in my experience. I've only seen playwright at startups.

same in my experience.

I've personally implemented Playwright in a large enterprise company. Puppeteer before that.

Generally if you have a lot of legacy selenium scripts it's probably not worth it to switch everything over, but if you're creating a new UI automation framework I've just never seen selenium as a first choice for that.

Don't get me wrong it's still solid technology though.

yes, i've noticed some tendency for [agentic] qa services to go the puppeteer and then playwright route (sometimes either or). it's almost too easy to get running with pw. and, hence, enticing for any startup that wants to get off the ground asap and break even. seems vibium may tap into that startup market as it matures.

legacy selenium suites are a strong contender for vibium adoption. i think hugs has been surveying a ton of folks, he may have a better bird's eye view of the potential user base.

as for academic use of selenium, we have boni garcia - maker/popularizer or selenium webdriver manager teaching at a uni in spain. (maybe an isolated example, but he's rather known in the community)

Isn't Selenium vs Playwright more a Java vs JS/ES/TS thing?

i started the selenium project as just a js and python thing. but it got really popular in java circles.

vibium will also be a big tent project and support ts/js, python, java, and as many other languages we can support, too. but i started with ts/js because that's what's extremely popular right now. (and i like js!)

(side-note: i f'ing love nim, we will be supporting nim, too. getting nim on the tiobe top 20 is on my bucket list.)

Selenium was a part of my degree. I had a course involving it.

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