Replace the GitHub repo with an executable Electron app, beat the world.
How’d you guess my secret plan? ;) Definitely in the cards going forward
Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
101–110 of 131 posts
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, we're looking to build out our library of authentication plugins. Many websites offer "Sign in with Google" which makes things easier, you can just specify that in the autotab.yaml file. If you have a specific website in mind, I'd be happy to add support for it!
Thanks for the reply! I was thinking about an internal website. I don't know if this is a reasonable suggestion, but maybe you could focus on common SSOs and 2FA providers like Duo and OneLogin?
Interesting! I think the way we’ll handle this is the sane way we handle Google 2FA atm: We have you log in and do 2FA manually once, then we save the logged out cookies.
Why the logged out cookies? That way even if someone gets the cookies they still need the password, but the automation can log in with just your password, no 2FA needed.
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good to know! The comments have definitely made us update towards looking into Playwright again quite seriously
Playwright is definitely the industry standard testing tool for those who are likely to be interested in Autotab too - I'm a test engineer and the last time I used Selenium was probably 2017. Playwright is everywhere that's comfortable using AI-tooling!
Interesting! We are more focused on automations as opposed to testing - would you say the same applies there as well?
Also Selenium does have 10x the downloads of Playwright on PyPI - is Python different or do you think that metric is misleading?
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#104Earlier 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.
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…
That’s super helpful, thanks for explaining!
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#105Congrats on the launch! This definitely seems useful for some stuff I've been doing, like filling out a CRM spreadsheet with the right user data.
Thanks so much! Glad to hear it
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#106This is very cool! I want to host this on a server and deliver it using BrowserBox so you can build automations on mobile. This was what I originally created BrowserBox for--a delivery platform for web scraping authoring tools so you're not limited by extensions--but got into building the remote browser as a product, and haven't got around to the automation authoring tool yet, haha! Thank you for creating this, and m…
Thanks! Excited to see what you do with it BrowserBox looks cool, I couldn’t tell from the README what browser engine it uses. Did you build your own?
Thank you, Jonas!
No, building that wouldn't give us anything. We use Chrome. Also works with anything else derived from Chromium, so that's Edge, Brave, etc.
Chrome runs headless on the server, instrumented with Chrome DevTools Protocol^0. The cool thing about using the DevTools protocol is you can customize so much. CDP is basically like a superset of the extensions APIs. In our case, one thing it's useful for is fine control over live-streaming the tabs.
You must be super busy with everything you're doing, if you ever have any questions about anything feel free to launch an email to me at cris@dosyago.com -- I wish you the best with autotab!
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#107How is this different from Playwright? There, You can record your steps and get a python script?
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playwright is definitely the industry standard testing tool for those who are likely to be interested in Autotab too - I'm a test engineer and the last time I used Selenium was probably 2017. Playwright is everywhere that's comfortable using AI-tooling!
Interesting! We are more focused on automations as opposed to testing - would you say the same applies there as well? Also Selenium does have 10x the downloads of Playwright on PyPI - is Python different or do you think that metric is misleading?
Selenium IS the more popular library, but it’s mostly used in more old-school places like banks and large corporations. This is fairly anecdotal but companies up for AI-guided paths in prod will more likely be on Cypress or Playwright, and from that Playwright fits in for your case because it’s also webdriver driven. The package actually includes a webdriver btw, so you don’t have to ask users to manage that themselves (for example brew chromedriver has to have permission changes to run if you follow your readme, which playwright would avoid).
Edit: as they both use the same interface it might not be too bad to support both?
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you have a feedback loop, for example trying the test in the background (headless) and if it doesn't work altering paths and retrying?
Yes! Two things we’re working on that would be very cool are 1) seeing the mirrored actions executed live as you record and 2) even if the website changes later, using AI at runtime to auto-heal the automation.
Cool! Good luck, it would help me with my work so I’m rooting for you :)
Re: Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
#110> 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
Ah that makes sense. I missed the API auth part, assumed BYO(OAAK) was the default