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by nirvdrum 1607 days ago
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.
1 comments
nkozyra 1607 days ago
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.

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nirvdrum 1607 days ago
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/

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nkozyra 1607 days ago
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.

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hugs 1607 days ago
fwiw, Selenium (in v4) now supports CDP. From the website:

"WebDriver Bidi is the next generation of the W3C WebDriver protocol and aims to provide a stable API implemented by all browsers, but it’s not yet complete. Until it is, Selenium provides access to the CDP for those browsers that implement it (such as Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge, and Firefox), allowing you to enhance your tests in interesting ways."

https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/bidirection...

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