Correcting Wrong ‘Playwright’s Advantage over Selenium” Part 3: “Playwright has Native Auto-Waiting Mechanism”

A wrong approach that brings confusion.

Let’s continue to correct the third wrong claim in this YouTube video, “Playwright vs Selenium: What Advantages Make Playwright the Winner in Automation Testing Battle 🏆”.

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

Table of Contents:
· Claim 3. “Playwright has Native Auto-Waiting Mechanism”
· Playwright waiting is generally applied
· My Selenium Test Script for the Payment Test
· FAQ

Claim 3. “Playwright has Native Auto-Waiting Mechanism”

This so-called “Auto-Waiting” is no good, as it can cause confusion unnecessarily. Remind you that Cypress has a similar thing, and its marketing team sang for it for quite some time. Did it actually win over Selenium? No, Cypress.io is dying.

“Auto-Waiting” is more like a marketing term (not sure invented by whom? Maybe Cypress marketing team?). It is, in fact, a kind of fake auto-waiting. I have written three articles on this topic:

• Playwright’s Auto-Waiting is Wrong

• Waiting Strategies for Test Steps in Web Test Automation
  (Medium’s curators recommended this as a ‘Boosted’)

• Auto-Waiting in Web Test Automation Clarified

The above explained, from a technical perspective,

• why ‘auto-waiting’ is unnecessary and causes problems

• Selenium WebDriver waiting is sufficient, maybe a bit verbose

• A simple solution to overcome that minor ‘verbose’ issue.

In this article, I will clarify from a manual testing (or end-user) perspective. After all, Web test automation is a form of end-user testing.