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Comment by jonasnelle | Hacker News Reader

Good to know! The comments have definitely made us update towards looking into Playwright again quite seriously

Yeah - I moved my entire automation library over at the beginning of the year. The docker integrations and ease of switching out browsers without having to manage webdrivers individually sealed the deal. I'm also tentatively using their selectors a bit, although find I have to retreat to Xpath quite a bit. Playwright seems to be the obvious choice for testing - but automation who knows.

If you can be playwright for automation instead of testing - that'd be a biiiig market. Lot's and lot's of scrapers out there and it's a market microsoft is not interested in.

Interesting, can you say more about why you prefer Playwright’s selectors? Helpful to have some anecdotes from real experience!

I don’t prefer I’m just playing. If they work, the readability of the code is just simpler vs xpath.

But it’s less than 5% of selectors across the code base

Playwright is definitely the industry standard testing tool for those who are likely to be interested in Autotab too - I'm a test engineer and the last time I used Selenium was probably 2017. Playwright is everywhere that's comfortable using AI-tooling!

Interesting! We are more focused on automations as opposed to testing - would you say the same applies there as well?

Also Selenium does have 10x the downloads of Playwright on PyPI - is Python different or do you think that metric is misleading?

Selenium IS the more popular library, but it’s mostly used in more old-school places like banks and large corporations. This is fairly anecdotal but companies up for AI-guided paths in prod will more likely be on Cypress or Playwright, and from that Playwright fits in for your case because it’s also webdriver driven. The package actually includes a webdriver btw, so you don’t have to ask users to manage that themselves (for example brew chromedriver has to have permission changes to run if you follow your readme, which playwright would avoid).

Edit: as they both use the same interface it might not be too bad to support both?

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