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by nirvdrum 1601 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/

1 comments

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.

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...