Is Playwright already the finest test automation tool?

Mustafa Mašetić
9 min readFeb 26, 2023
Playwright.dev

For many years, Selenium was the go-to testing framework for QA engineers seeking a test automation solution. It was able to test any browser (which was especially important during Internet Explorer’s reign) and any platform. However, it seems that those times are now behind us. Most web applications today are developed with modern frontend frameworks such as React, Angular, or Next.js, and all browsers can be divided into three groups: those based on the Chromium engine, Firefox running on Gecko, and Safari running on WebKit. Since the beginning of Playwright, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari have all been supported. This eliminates the once-common argument for the need for a cross-browser framework. Playwright covers everything.

Impressive Features

Playwright’s superior cross-browser testing capabilities are due to its unique architecture. Unlike Selenium, Playwright interacts with the browser at the API level, which allows it to work more efficiently and bypass the limitations of traditional browser automation frameworks. This makes it faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain.

Playwright, like Selenium, has the unique advantage of supporting multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, and C#. This makes it easy to integrate into existing projects and…

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Mustafa Mašetić
Mustafa Mašetić

Written by Mustafa Mašetić

Test automation engineer interested in Playwright, Robot Framework, Selenium and CI/CD.

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