What are reasons to prefer puppeteer to playwright which supports many browsers?
> Cross-browser. Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox.
> Cross-browser. Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox.
I used to have so many issues with Selenium and so only used it in must have situations defaulting to capybara to run out specs.
The license notice you mention is indeed there [2], but also isn't surprising they wouldn't reinvent the wheel for those things they wrote earlier and that simply work. Even if they didn't directly use code, Microsoft would be silly to not add it given their previous involvement with puppeteer.
Even if it was originally a fork, they are such different products at this point that at best you could say that playwright started out as a fork (Which, again, it did not as far as I can tell).
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/commit/9ba375c063448...
[2] https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/3d2b5e680147577...
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/tree/48627ad48405583...
It isn't just a "wrapper around puppeteer" either but a complete test automation framework bringing you the whole set of runner, assertion library and a bunch of supporting tools in the surrounding ecosystem.
Where puppeteer still mainly is a library and just that. With which there in principle is nothing wrong, but at this stage of development does make them distinctly different products.
I agree with that.
The base concept is the same, there is a map between element handles on the server and elements in the browser contexts which are synced over channels with websockets. The user creates an element handle in the sever and the element gets wrapped inside the browser context with a unique id. Any events emitted by the element, are sent over websockets to the server.
At one point, I had used this code to inject a script into browser contexts with a Chrome Extension which communicated with a server over websockets to automate browsers with the Chrome Extension installed.
> I think Playwright depends on forking the browsers to support the features they need, so that may be less stable than using a standard explicitly supported by the browsers, and/or more representative of realistic browser use.
(And for Safari/WebKit to support it as well, but I'm not holding my breath for that one.) Though I hope Playwright will adopt BiDi at some point as well, as its testing features and API are really nice.