[tnolet]

We see a strong adoption of Playwright. It’s the default we recommend to users now. We also support Puppeteer, but its development is lagging.

Having said that, I would love to support Cypress if I had infinite time and focus.

Side note: Selenium is not on the menu, even with its large install base.

We are aiming for where the puck is going and it’s going to Playwright.

Full disclaimer: I’m CTO at Checkly.

[djbusby]

The checkly folk recently published this

https://blog.checklyhq.com/cypress-vs-selenium-vs-playwright...

Cypress vs Selenium vs Playwright vs Puppeteer speed comparison

[synergy20]

I saw puppeteer is actively developed, wonder where the 'lagging' implies.

doesn't playwright use puppeteer for chromium-based browsers(even edge-based), I thought it's just a wrapper for puppeteer with extra support for firefox.

[axlee]

How about Python bindings? Selenium is the only decent option in that space so far, are we wrong?

[no_wizard]

looks like playwright is bridging this gap too:

https://playwright.dev/python/

[nopenopenopeno]

Playwright Python is excellent

[cush]

Any insights on the flakiness of Playwright vs other tools you’ve used?

[hugs]

Why was Selenium off the menu?

[cebert]

Selenium is slow and based on webdriver. I think most consider it legacy at this point. Most new projects tend to use Playwright, Cypress, or Puppeteer for E2E tests. All three options are much more performant and reliable.

[nirvdrum]

I've been out of this space for a while, but isn't WebDriver the only cross-browser spec for browser automation? The last I knew, the browser vendors were removing other automation hooks for security reasons and heavily influenced the WebDriver spec.

[nkozyra]

Well, playwright is cross browser too.

I've only been using/playing with it for a few weeks, but I find it more contemporary and less clunky than selenium. And it's lighter and runs faster. I dislike passing around a driver to tests and the playwright built-in testing (which I think is wrapping the expect library) is pretty nice.

I haven't fully made peace with the selector API in playwright, which uses a lot of experimental css selectors and a custom DSL, but these are minor learning curve issues.

[nirvdrum]

I'm sorry if not clear, but I was asking about the WebDriver spec [1]. The terminology gets confusing because WebDriver was a tool that then merged with Selenium and Selenium implemented the WebDriver wire protocol. If Playwright isn't using WebDriver, is there a new browser automation API?

Edit: It looks like it's using Chrome's DevTools protocol. I'll have to read up more on that. I thought Google deliberately didn't want that to be used for automation, but I'm probably thinking of something else.

[1] -- https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver2/

[nkozyra]

I'm not sure if it's using (or can use) CDP for all automation or for chromium, but CDP became my go to for headless browser work in the last six months, it's bypassing the abstraction of puppeteer and has a lot more language support.

But it's not itself a test framework, nor is puppeteer, so it's nice having a more modern toolset on top.

[yesimahuman]

WebDriver through WebdriverIO is actually really solid and I think more teams should give it a try. My understanding is you don’t need any Selenium tooling if you use it but can interface with projects like chromedriver directly.

It’s faster than cypress and you have access to a massive ecosystem as well of things that speak the WebDriver protocol, as well as the ability to do hybrid and native mobile testing (through Appium).

I’ve been really happy with it and we’ve decided to go all-in on it for apps in the Ionic ecosystem.