Playwright for .NET is now stable (opens in new tab)

Playwright is fantastic, but having used a lot Robot Framework in the past, I would not recommend it even to my worst enemy. The experience he continuous from string / to string conversions that you need to do with the content of the steps and the orrible structure of the directories and the amount of glue code to share some common methods around, brought me to don't even take into consideration job offers that have "Robot Framework" in them.

I'm using Playwright right now, migrating horrendous Selenium tests at work and it's a real breeze of fresh air. It just works, it comes battery included with superb debugging tools (step by step execution directly in the browser, trace dumping for further analysis, reliable interactions recorder with pretty decent code generation ...).

It's an amazing piece of software for a domain that was kept on the side of the road for years.

If you already tried Cypress, then it's Cypress but with true multiple browser support, available in 4 languages, without the bloat and a cleaner and more idiomatic API.

As others mentioned, the same guy is involved in Playwright. One thing I wanted to mention is that he is extremely responsive. I posted several issues a number of years ago and he fixed them pronto. And even dug into the underlying Chromium issues.

you need to put this before the Screenshot ?

await page.WaitForLoadStateAsync(LoadState.NetworkIdle);

Same guy does playwright sharp, he should really have more supporters

Have you tried selinium and phantomjs headless ? I was using that a few years ago and it worked very well.

I put that in the original title, but I think it got edited out by a mod. :)

Still requires nodejs though, it is more a wrapper than a port.

I've had some issues with Cypress selectors randomly failing to find matching elements, even though they are clearly present. Like if I run the same script 10 times it goes through ~7 times. I wanted to try Playwright for another application to avoid such issues.

And then I was very surprised to get almost the exact same issues with Playwright. Running against a different application with different test cases.

Has anyone else had issues like this with React applications? It's very annoying to not be able to write repeatable tests.

Well, Cypress is going to use playwright for their Webkit integration.

Cypress is more limited compared to Playwright such as multi-domains aren't supported, multiple tabs, or popup windows. For my tests that require that I am using Playwright and for the rest I am currently using Cypress. But I do think the test writing experience is better with Cypress :)

I am considering to move to Playwright for everything now with the new Trace Viewer (https://playwright.dev/docs/debug#playwright-trace-viewer); and contribute to that.

This question does come up quite a lot. One thing the remember is that Cypress is "batteries included" testing framework, where Playwright is essentially just the browser automation part of it.

I know the Playwright team is "moving up the stack" and adding many specific testing features, but it's not at the same level (yet?) as Cypress.

We use both Testim.io and Playwright for performance testing.

I work at Microsoft but at a completely unrelated team and while I know some of the folks who work on playwright I have no official affiliation and my opinions represent my own and not my employer's.

Playwright is great for this sort of thing! All we do is run the same test with two variants (before/after the change) and run a student t-test (well, a welch t-test but close enough).

It's ±50 LoC and as long as you're fine with running the test enough times to get statistical significance Playwright works quite well for this

It depends exactly what you mean by performance testing. The problem with a lot of UI tests is that you might need to add artificial slowness to make the tests more likely to pass. Even waiting for something to appear can take longer than it would in a browser. If you want a basic number to see regression, sure you can use this.

If you want to get a sense of how far the system can scale, you would be better with a proper performance testing framework that can run multiple threads, ideally from multiple locations (to avoid any network limits) and built-in support for accurate timing. Apache Bench is pretty common and relatively easy to setup and use. There is also JMeter and even SaaS services to do it for you.