On: Closer to the Metal: Leaving Playwright for CDP

[nikisweeting]

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".

[patrickhogan1 → nikisweeting]

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.

[nikisweeting → patrickhogan1]

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

[nikisweeting → nikisweeting]

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...

[hugs → patrickhogan1]

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.

[patrickhogan1 → hugs]

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.