[steveklabnik]

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...)

[hugs]

selenium creator here. hi!

[steveklabnik]

Hi! Sorry, I was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek here. This space, in my experience, has always been frustrating, because it's a hard problem. I myself am fighting with Playwright these days, just like I used to fight with Selenium. (And, to my understanding, you created Selenium due to frustrations with Mercury, hence the name... I'm curious if that's true or just something I heard!)

I still deeply appreciate these tools, even though I also find them a bit frustrating.

[hugs]

it's all good, man. if it makes you feel better, i don't like rust. ;-) my eldest son loves it, though!

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

[steveklabnik]

> it's all good, man. if it makes you feel better, i don't like rust. ;-) my eldest son loves it, though!

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!

[rudasn]

Off topic, but it's threads like these that keep me on HN. Gold :)

[hu3]

selenium helped my team so much back in the days. Thank you for it!

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.

[nikisweeting]

Wow hi! Thanks so much for building selenium! I've used it many times in my career, and I looked at Selenium Grid for inspiration for browser devops in my last job.

[Aurornis]

I always enjoyed Selenium, for what it’s worth.

[nikisweeting]

I tweaked the article text a bit, if anyone has more history to fill in I'd love to collect browser automation lore!

https://github.com/browser-use/website/blob/main/posts/playw...

[gregpr07]

Hi, the first version of Browser Use was actually built on Selenium but we quite quickly switched to Playwright

[hugs]

yeah, i noticed that. apologies if i missed a post about it... what do you wish didn't suck about selenium?

[moi2388]

Scrolling to an element doesn’t always work because somehow the element might not be ready. You need to add ids to the element and select by that to ensure it works properly.

[hugs]

thanks! yeah, playwright was a huge improvement there -- waiting until an element was actually ready. the official posture from the selenium project ("figure it out, be explicit") wasn't always the most user friendly messaging.

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.

[moi2388]

It’s literally the only issue I’ve ever encountered with selenium, and having ids would be good for more reasons than just testing, so for me it wasn’t even an actual issue.

[nikisweeting]

whats the downside of using frameId/targetId+backendNodeId as the stable element ids?

[moi2388]

I just wanted to say I absolutely love your product. Thank you!

[arm32]

Uh, ahem, <clears throat>, we meant the _other_ Selenium.

[hugs]

that's what i thought. :) personal life accomplishment was seeing wikipedia add a disambiguation link on the element's page. you know, because it's right up there in importance as the periodic table, obviously.

[hungryhobbit]

You have to love how the OP completely left Selenium out of their "history".

[vasusen]

2011 were definitely not the dark ages!! I used to use Selenium for everything back in the day. I was able to scrape all of Wikipedia in 2011 entirely on my laptop and pipe it to Stanford NLTK to create a very cool adjective recommender for nouns.

[fzzzy]

Lol I came here to write this exact comment about the dark ages and selenium. I, too, feel old.

[hugs]

i suspect this is how vim and emacs developers feel every time someone announces a new vscode fork.