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Comment by monch1962 | Hacker News Reader

monch1962

I could see this being part of a lightweight browser UI testing framework.

There's already ways to drive a headless UI (Selenium, puppeteer), but they require automation testers to interact with page elements via the "normal" DOM which can be quite painful in terms of creating automation tests - DSLs to drive DOM automation are necessarily huge.

I could envision browser automation via browsh using a very small DSL e.g. browsh.url() to navigate to a URL, browsh.click() to click on an element, browsh.text_exists?() to check whether text exists, browsh.link_exists?() to check whether a clickable link exists

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I've thought of that too. The trouble is that Browsh's text renderer is more of a science than an art. It's quite hard to actually get a guarantee of the same text twice, which is a pretty important condition of testing.

But yes, I'd love for Browsh to be used in such a way!

Guaranteeing the same text twice might not be so important. There are pixel comparison testing tools for popular browsers. Your advantage is probably speed. Would cypress end-to-end tests run way faster in Browsh than in a graphical browser? If so, you've got something of value to big companies. You might want to partner with or contract for Cypress.

EDIT: Since Browsh depends on Firefox I'm curious whether it's actually faster than a graphical browser.

As an anecdote, somebody at my workplace has just spent a day tearing their hair out trying to figure out how to get our selenium tests running automatically on a headless machine, because the resolution flat refused to go above 1024x768. Even then, they're slow and heavyweight.

A very fast browser not tied to a graphical display with the bonus of being able to put error screenshots into all of our existing tooling could actually be quite beneficial here, whether the text is character-identical every time or not.

Since browsh requires Firefox so I'm not sure you'd really get much of a speed benefit over Selenium

> more of a science than an art.

Given the rest of your sentence, I think you mean the opposite.

oops, yeah

Check out (my) https://heliumhq.com. Not text-based but very high-level.

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