Correcting Wrong “Playwright’s Advantage over Selenium” Part 1: “Playwright is Modern and Faster than Selenium”

New ≠ Modern ≠ Better. Faster? I haven’t seen a truly successful Playwright implementation with a large suite yet.

🎖The article was selected by Medium Curators for a Boost (“boost the best ideas and best information on Medium”), also one of my personal favorites.

Recently, I watched a YouTube video, “Playwright vs Selenium: What Advantages Make Playwright the Winner in Automation Testing Battle 🏆”.
Each of the presenter’s purported “Playwright Advantages” is either wrong or irrelevant in the context of real web test automation. I will elaborate on each of these points in this article series:

• “Playwright is Modern and Faster than Selenium” 😒

• “Playwright has Parallel Execution Support” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has Native Auto-Waiting Mechanism” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has a native test runner” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has native HTML Reporters” 👎🏽

• “Playwright Features Can be Configured in one Configuration” 👎🏽

• “Playwright supports a range of Testing Types, e.g. API Testing, Component Testing, …” 👎🏽

• “Playwright UI Mode, CodeGen, Debugging support.” 👎🏽

• “Playwright ARIA locator support” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has frequent releases” 👎🏽 👎🏽

• Wrap Up

How could this youtuber got it all wrong? Yes, it is very possible, because real automated engineers extremely rare. (Patrick Copeland, Google Senior Engineering Director, referred them as “Gold”)

Speaking of being off the mark totally, China International Capital Corporation made 10 predictions for the Chinese economy in 2023, and they all turned out to be incorrect!, that’s really hard, still, some ‘financial experts’ managed to accomplish that.

Table of Contents:
· My Objectiveness on Playwright
∘ 1. I do know a bit about Playwright
∘ 2. I added Playwright support in my testing IDE (TestWise) and award-winning CT server (BuildWise)
∘ 3. Selenium WebDriver is Excellent
∘ 4. Playwright is winning over Cypress, but not Selenium WebDriver.
· Claim 1, “Playwright is Modern and Faster than Selenium, due to its Clean Architecture“. Wrong!
∘ 1. New ≠ Modern ≠ Better.
∘ 2. “Clean Architecture”? Do we testers really care?
∘ 3. “Playwright faster”, maybe. But I haven’t yet seen a solid Playwright implementation to support that.

My Objectiveness on Playwright

The first question in Playwright fans’ minds is, “Zhimin, you are being subjective”. How many statements on the Internet are not subjective, including the “Playwright’s advantages over Selenium in X, Y, Z, … make it winner” (two recent surveys showed otherwise, see below), then?

Unlike many others, I will provide objective proof to support my statements.

1. I do know a bit about Playwright

Many readers know I mostly do web test automation using raw Selenium WebDriver + RSpec (since 2011). I have used and reviewed other frameworks as well, including Playwright. My daughter used Playwright for her intern job, where she crushed the so-called ‘best senior test automation engineer’ there (an interesting story).

Also, I have rescued failed Playwright test automation (upgrading to raw Selenium WebDriver).

2. I added Playwright support in my testing IDE (TestWise) and award-winning CT server (BuildWise)

I am an old-school engineer. If necessary, I would dive deep (really deep) for new hyped technology before commenting on it. In this case, I added Playwright support to my tools: TestWise and BuildWise. This also shows that I am not totally against Playwright; it is just not as good as raw Selenium WebDriver.

Check out the following articles (by my daughter).

• Set up and Develop Playwright Test Scripts with TestWise IDE

• Set up Running Playwright Test in BuildWise CT Server

3. Selenium WebDriver is Excellent

This is a comparison article, so I must mention my Selenium experience for readers who don’t know me well.

Check out a case study of my WhenWise app test suite, consisting of 570 user story-level End-to-End UI tests in raw Selenium WebDriver + RSpec.

This is just one of my Selenium suites that enabled me to do “Daily Production Releases” for all my web apps since 2012.

4. Playwright is winning over Cypress, but not Selenium WebDriver.

There is a clear trend that Playwright is taking over Cypress (my prediction in this article, 5 months ago. One tech blogger disagreed, I used the reference he mentioned to prove him wrong). The most recent two independent surveys yielded a similar result:

https://zhiminzhan.medium.com/selenium-webdriver-is-still-the-best-web-test-automation-framework-in-2024-3c0c68d38965

The “old” Selenium WebDriver leads by a huge margin.

Claim 1, “Playwright is Modern and Faster than Selenium, due to its Clean Architecture“. Wrong!

The claim (screenshotted) in that YouTube video.

1. New ≠ Modern ≠ Better.