Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

autotab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 131 posts

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#42

Post by jonasnelle »

jondwillis wrote: post #37

This is amazing. I will try to have it automate my system of agents web app in a meaningful way (turtles all the way down.) Shameless plug: https://github.com/agi-merge/waggle-dance BTW I don’t normally use Chrome- I know why you would start with that, but it would be great to see a Firefox or even Safari version of this.

Glad to hear it, let me know how it goes! And yes, other browsers are definitely in our future at some point

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#43

Post by jonasnelle »

atum47 wrote: post #41

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't the chrome extension market kind of dead? I had some silly extension a long time ago but after receiving a lot of emails from Google saying that they were killing the ecosystem I've dropped them.

autotab is not an always on browser extension like you are probably used to. autotab is only added to the Selenium-controlled browser window you use to write the automation while you're recording.

Also my experience differs more broadly, I use browser extensions quite a bit, e.g. for ad blocking and password management. Afaik Honey was basically a browser extension and was bought by Paypal for $4B.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#44

Post by jsf01 »

This is a great use of the sidepanel API. Really like the idea and how you implemented it. The Firefox equivalent to that API isn’t identical to Chrome’s, and I believe that there is currently no way to trigger the side panel to open programmatically unless it’s in response to a user action. So it may take a bit of work, but would be exciting to see support for FF in the future.

A bit tangential but I was curious what you used to record the demo video on your landing page with those zoom-in animations during critical moments. I’d like to record something like that for some of my side projects and thought your video looked rather polished.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#45

Post by alexirobbins »

pedrolins wrote: post #8

This is amazing!! I've found myself writing selenium scripts to automate tasks for my dad's job (things such as getting a name from a spreadsheet, putting that name in a website's search box and from there repeating the same actions for 100s of names) and saved him a ton of time. Making browser automation more accessible by just showing the machine how to do it will definitely make lots of people's lives easier. Can'…

Interesting, sounds like the kind of stuff we're excited about helping with! Would love to hear what you think once you try it, email is in my bio if you're open to a chat.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#47

Post by LordKeren »

jonasnelle wrote: post #31
pid-1 wrote: post #9

Related: https://playwright.dev/ has a built-in code generator. In *my opinion*, it's also more pleasant to work with than Selenium.

Interesting, what features are most impactful in making it more pleasant to work with? We picked Selenium because it seems much more widely used at least in the Python world (selenium has about 10x more downloads on PyPI than playwright). My guess is that's at least partly because Playwright is more focused on the JS/TS ecosystem and testing.

I recently finished moving fr Python-selenium to Python-playwright. Though my outcomes might be different, it is such a significant improvement that I would strongly, strongly recommend at least spending a couple days trying it out if you are familiar with selenium.

To my team, selenium’s only advantage in the python ecosystem is that it is easier to hire people with experience. However, anyone familiar with selenium is likely to pick up playwright extremely quickly anyways

Playwright does ship a pytest integration but it is not required

Some highlights:

1. Better waiting — everything is auto-waited and auto-retried by default

2. Easy to install browsers — no need to get separate webdriver browsers. Just run “playwright install chromium”

3. Full, accurate typing

4. Trace viewing to step through a script execution

5. Async support

6. (Arguably) more pythonic syntax and easier to pick up/ train people

I really enjoyed mastering selenium over the years, but I struggle to think of a use case for it outside of maintaining legacy script suites anymore. Playwright just does it better.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#48

Post by jonasnelle »

jsf01 wrote: post #44

This is a great use of the sidepanel API. Really like the idea and how you implemented it. The Firefox equivalent to that API isn’t identical to Chrome’s, and I believe that there is currently no way to trigger the side panel to open programmatically unless it’s in response to a user action. So it may take a bit of work, but would be exciting to see support for FF in the future. A bit tangential but I was curious wha…

Thanks! It's still very much early days for the Sidepanel and the API feels very much in flux but an exciting new form factor for browser-integrated experiences. Makes total sense, supporting other browsers is likely something we will do in the future

I used https://www.screen.studio/ for the demo and past demos, it works quite well I find though it can get a bit too excited on the zoom ins and I have to cut out some of them

Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts

#49

Post by matt3D »

How comfortable should I feel about having this record the input of potentially sensitive information if it's going to send those inputs off to an LLM?

One way I can see around it is to not put anything sensitive in during the record, but sometimes I might need to enter a password etc.

Post reply on HN