With Playwright you can write end-to-end tests that run in Chrome, Firefox and WebKit. By using the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) Playwright can offer new features and eliminate many of the issues seen with WebDriver. Chromium-based browsers implement CDP directly. To support Firefox and Webkit, though, the Playwright team has to submit patches to these browsers, which may sometimes limit the framework.
Playwright’s many features include: Built-in auto-waits, which result in tests that are more reliable and easier to understand; browser contexts, which let you test that persisting sessions across tabs work properly; and the ability to simulate notifications, geolocation and dark mode settings. Our teams are impressed with the stability Playwright brings to the test suite and like that they get feedback more quickly by running tests in parallel. Other features that set Playwright apart include better support for lazy loading and tracing. Although Playwright has some limitations — component support is currently experimental, for example — our teams consider it the go-to test framework and in some cases are migrating away from Cypress and Puppeteer.
Playwright allows you to write Web UI tests for Chromium and Firefox as well as WebKit, all through the same API. The tool has gained some attention for its support of all the major browser engines which it achieves by including patched versions of Firefox and Webkit. We continue to hear positive experience reports with Playwright, in particular its stability. Teams have also found it easy to migrate from Puppeteer, which has a very similar API.
Web UI testing continues to be an active space. Some of the folks who built Puppeteer have since moved on to Microsoft and are now applying their learnings to Playwright, which allows you to write tests for Chromium and Firefox as well as WebKit, all through the same API. Playwright has gained some attention for its support of all the major browser engines, which it currently achieves by including patched versions of Firefox and Webkit. It remains to be seen how quickly other tools can catch up, with more and more support for the Chrome DevTools Protocol as a common API for automating browsers.
