Is Playwright already the finest test automation tool?

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 ensures that teams can work in the language they are most comfortable with.

Overall, Playwright is a powerful and flexible tool that can help QA engineers streamline their testing process and ensure that their web applications work flawlessly across all major browsers and platforms.

To recap the top features highlighted on the Playwright official website, we can list them and examine each one:

• Cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-language support
• Resilience
• No trade-offs
• Simple test isolation and authentication persistence
• Visual Studio Code integration, test code generation, and selector picking

Installation

There are two ways to install the software. The first method is to use a Node.js package manager like npm. If you choose this method, you will need…