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Comment by patrickhogan1 | Hacker News Reader

Selenium was very usable before 2011.

This post is like saying Grafana and not mentioning Nagios

It was, but I feel like the advent of headless browsers marked a step function explosion in browser automation. Also any earlier than 2010 is when I was like 13yo, so it's more like "the dark ages in my own memory" than "objectively dark ages in automation history".

I get that drawing historical boundaries is arbitrary, but Selenium is a really good prior.

Selenium offered headless mode and integrated with 3rd party providers like BrowserStack, which ran acceptance tests in parallel in the cloud. It seems like what browser-use.com is doing is a modern day version with many more features & adaptability.

speaking of priors... sauce labs existed for three whole years before browserstack (selenium and sauce founder here. :-)

i like that there are new startups in the space, though. things were getting pretty stale and uninspired.

Sauce Labs is excellent. I've actually used it extensively myself (not sure why BrowserStack came to mind first). I remember Sauce Labs was super active in the SF Selenium community and the Selenium meetups. Just checked my emails. Good memories.

Thank you for building Selenium.

Yeah I agree, I changed the history section a bit: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/2a0f4bd93a43...

whoops pasted the wrong link and it's too late to edit. meant to link to the updated article section here: https://browser-use.com/posts/playwright-to-cdp#:~:text=Sele...

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