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

autotab.com

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

#82

Post by jonasnelle »

btbuildem wrote: post #77

> This will launch a Chrome session controlled by Selenium and then log you in to Google Why is logging into Google a requirement?

We currently only allow log in with Google for logging in to autotab itself, but will add login with username/password and other options soon! Depending on feedback we might also build a bring your own Open AI API key option

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

#83

Post by jonasnelle »

lobochrome wrote: post #75
jonasnelle wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know! The comments have definitely made us update towards looking into Playwright again quite seriously

Yeah - I moved my entire automation library over at the beginning of the year. The docker integrations and ease of switching out browsers without having to manage webdrivers individually sealed the deal. I'm also tentatively using their selectors a bit, although find I have to retreat to Xpath quite a bit. Playwright seems to be the obvious choice for testing - but automation who knows. If you can be playwright for a…

Interesting, can you say more about why you prefer Playwright’s selectors? Helpful to have some anecdotes from real experience!

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

#87

Post by wackget »

lucgagan wrote: post #80

I am building _exactly_ the same thing for Playwright over at https://ray.run/ . I think this is the future of writing tests no doubt. Planning to launch next week. By the looks of it, I am taking a slightly different approach than you. I am using LLM only to identify elements, but the actual generators are created using https://ray.run/browser-extension

FYI your animated background should be disabled when your visitor [prefers-reduced-motion](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...).

Edit: or just disabled in general cos it's super annoying

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

#88

Post by hugs »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #74
jonasnelle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wildly better developer experience. Playwright is also much less flakey and easier to work with than cypress, another alternative to selenium. Selenium is quite outdated, though still widely used. It's much older. I would look at downloads over time / rate of change, not total downloads. My hot take- don't hook yourselves to outdated tech. Don't take my word for it- go try out selenium, Cypress, and playwright and dr…

fwiw, the Selenium project is now old enough to go to college (19 years this month!); it's not ready to retire just yet. (Side-note: Google Chrome is 15 years old. Age is just a number.) Selenium is still learning from other projects and implementing new things. Specifically, check out the WebDriver BiDi project, adding a bidirectional protocol which was the core of what made Playwright and Puppeteer faster. Also, Selenium devs are working with the W3C to make this work for everyone.

https://github.com/w3c/webdriver-bidi

https://w3c.github.io/webdriver-bidi/

Google wrote a good explainer about WebDriver BiDi here:

https://developer.chrome.com/articles/webdriver-bidi/

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

#89

Post by justusthane »

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.

Wow! I haven't played with it a much yet, but just wanted to say that waggledance.ai seems really, really cool. It seems like a really interesting idea, and I love the UI and general aesthetic!
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