I work at Google, but this is based on stuff I knew before I worked at Google, which I heard from a coworker. I haven't checked on the project since joining. The Puppeteer TL (the guy linked in the grandparent comment) apparently had ambitions to make Puppeteer work cross browser like Playwright does now. However, the Puppeteer project was heavily deprioritized and the TL would basically never be able to achieve their vision. This made it pretty easy for Microsoft to basically take the entire Puppeteer team from Google. That coworker of mine told me also that after all those Puppeteer devs left, Puppeteer is now basically only a 20% project worked on by a few people. The number of open issues/PRs done kinda reflects that (no idea of this is still true or not)
I manage the team at Google that currently owns the Puppeteer project.
The previous team that developed Puppeteer indeed moved to Microsoft and have since started Playwright.
While it is true that staffing is tight (isn't it always), the number of open issues does not tell the full story. The team has been busy with addressing technical debt that we inherited (testing, architecture, migrating to Typescript, etc) as well as investing in a standardized foundation to allow Puppeteer to work cross-browser in the future. This differs from the Playwright team's approach of shipping patched browser binaries.
> The team has been busy with addressing technical debt that we inherited [...] migrating to Typescript
Wow, not writing stuff in TypeScript is now considered technical debt? I knew people were already rushing to rewrite everything in TypeScript if they could, but didn't knew we'd come this far along the hype-cycle already.
Yes definitely. I've worked at two companies in three years spanning 250,000 employees and both companies consider writing JavaScript deprecated in favor of typescript.
I used Puppeteer on a project recently to generate some really big and complex PDFs that would have been a massive pain to do any other way, so thanks for your work, and I'm very happy to hear that the project isn't dead.
Glad to hear that. Puppeteer still has a number of compelling things over Playwright (like not shipping patched binaries) so I hope competition in this space can continue to happen :)
"Each version of Playwright needs specific versions of browser binaries to operate." [0]
They patch and compile browser binaries so they have the functionality Playwright needs.
Their build of Chromium is one release ahead of what's out but it looks like one could maintain a library of older Playwright browser binaries to test with. They probably have an older Firefox 91 binary that's feature-equivalent to the current Firefox ESR. Their WebKit builds won't ever be exactly the same as Apple Safari.
