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Web Automation: Don't Use Selenium, Use Playwright

  * Shantnu Tiwari

Shantnu Tiwari

Oct 27, 2022 * 2 min read

For web automation/testing, Selenium has been the de facto "standard"
since forever. It's simple to get started with and supports almost
every programming language.

My problem with it has been: It's good enough, but nothing more. It
doesn't work that well with modern, Javascript framework heavy sites
(Angular, React etc). I'm not saying it doesn't work-- just not too
well.

Another issue: While Selenium is supposedly "well documented", I
found that as soon as you start going off the beaten path, examples
are hard to find. Or there are 5 ways of doing something, none of
which work very well.

I really struggled with Selenium at a previous company. Selenium just
couldn't parse the over-engineered Javascript framework we had, and I
had to pile on hacks on hacks.

So much so, I started looking at Javascript testing frameworks like
Chai, Mocha, Cypress etc. The problem I found is that they require a
completely different setup, and aren't easy to get started for
someone from a Python background.

There have been dozens of Selenium alternatives over the years; I
tried quite a few. Almost everyone vanished after a few years (or
they stopped updating and just abandoned the project). I suppose
building a web testing framework is hard for volunteers.

Enter Playwright

I recently heard about Playwright. It looks really good and is built
by Microsoft (who have started putting out good open-source tools
like Vs Code). The Microsoft part is important, as it's more likely
it will be supported over the years.

The killer feature of Playwright is: You can automatically generate
tests by opening a web browser and manually running through the steps
you want. It saves the hassle I faced with Selenium, where you were
opening developer tools and finding the Xpath or similar. Yuck 

Now, to be honest, there were always tools that would do this for
you. But they were either a) Not very good b) Commercial and
expensive

The best part: Playwright "records" your steps and even gives you a
running Python script you can just directly use (or extract parts
from). I'm serious about the running part- I can literally record a
few steps and I will have a script I can then run with zero changes.
The other tools I tried before would give you small snippets of code
that would sorta work, but not really, forcing you to jump thru hoops
to get it working. Here, you get a ready made working script.

p

Playwright gives a fairly good implementation that I found works most
of the time. It only occasionally missed a step, and in those cases I
had to manually add it to the script. But I find Playwright's element
discovery easier than Selenium's.

Other benefits: You can record your runs as a video so you can view
them later if you find any strange failures. Playwright also creates
a detailed trace you can use to sort of "step thru" any failed runs.

Cons? It's still new. That means bugs and not-as-good documentation.
I found weird issues (when using the recorder) where I couldn't
scroll down to the bottom of the screen in Playwright's Chromium, but
could in a normal Chrome, forcing me to use other tricks to click the
button. But I don't know if this was a Chromium or Playwright issue.

But overall, for any new project, I'd always choose Playwright over
any existing tools.

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