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0 pointshugs4y ago0 comments

Why was Selenium off the menu?

0 comments

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.

nirvdrum4y 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.

nkozyra4y 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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yesimahuman4y ago

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.

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