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Puppeteer Support for Firefox

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#21

Post by huy-nguyen »

hugs wrote: post #2

Ranked #4 on HN at the moment and no comments. So I'll just say hi. (Selenium project creator here. I had nothing to do with this announcement, but feel free to ask me anything!) My hot take on things: When the Puppeteer team left Google to join Microsoft and continue the project as Playwright, that left Google high and dry. I don't think Google truly realized how complementary a browser automation tool is to an AI-a…

What’s the relationship between Selenium, Puppeteer and Webdriver BiDi? I’m a happy user of Playwright. Is there any reason why I should consider Selenium or Puppeteer?

Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#22

Post by devsda »

righthand wrote: post #13
hugs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unironically, ask ChatGPT (or your favorite LLM) to create a hello world WebDriver or Puppeteer script (and installation instructions) and go from there.

“Go ask ChatGPT” is the new “RTFM”.

I think it's the new "search/lookup xyz on Google".

Because Google search and search in general is no longer reliable or predictable and top results are likely to be ads or seo optimized fluff pieces, it is hard to make a search recommendation these days.

For now, ChatGPT is the new no-nonsense search engine(with caveats).

Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#24

Post by distortedsignal »

hugs wrote: post #14
righthand wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Go ask ChatGPT” is the new “RTFM”.

sorry, not sorry?

I don't think they're criticizing - I think it's observation.

It makes a lot of sense, and we're early-ish to the tech cycle. Reading the Manual/Google/ChatGPT are all just tools in the toolbelt. If you (an expert) is giving this advice, it should become mainstream soon-ish.

Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#26

Post by imiric »

huy-nguyen wrote: post #21
hugs wrote: post #2

Ranked #4 on HN at the moment and no comments. So I'll just say hi. (Selenium project creator here. I had nothing to do with this announcement, but feel free to ask me anything!) My hot take on things: When the Puppeteer team left Google to join Microsoft and continue the project as Playwright, that left Google high and dry. I don't think Google truly realized how complementary a browser automation tool is to an AI-a…

What’s the relationship between Selenium, Puppeteer and Webdriver BiDi? I’m a happy user of Playwright. Is there any reason why I should consider Selenium or Puppeteer?

> Is there any reason why I should consider Selenium or Puppeteer?

I'm not a heavy user of these tools, but I've dabbled in this space.

I think Playwright is far ahead as far as features and robustness go compared to alternatives. Firefox has been supported for a long time, as well as other features mentioned in this announcement like network interception and preload scripts. CDP in general is much more mature than WebDriver BiDi. Playwright also has a more modern API, with official bindings in several languages.

One benefit of WebDriver BiDi is that it's in process of becoming a W3C standard, which might lead to wider adoption eventually.

But today, I don't see a reason to use anything other than Playwright. Happy to read alternative opinions, though.

Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#28

Post by Vinnl »

huy-nguyen wrote: post #21
hugs wrote: post #2

Ranked #4 on HN at the moment and no comments. So I'll just say hi. (Selenium project creator here. I had nothing to do with this announcement, but feel free to ask me anything!) My hot take on things: When the Puppeteer team left Google to join Microsoft and continue the project as Playwright, that left Google high and dry. I don't think Google truly realized how complementary a browser automation tool is to an AI-a…

What’s the relationship between Selenium, Puppeteer and Webdriver BiDi? I’m a happy user of Playwright. Is there any reason why I should consider Selenium or Puppeteer?

I think Playwright depends on forking the browsers to support the features they need, so that may be less stable than using a standard explicitly supported by the browsers, and/or more representative of realistic browser use.

Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#29

Post by Vinnl »

e12e wrote: post #27

What are reasons to prefer puppeteer to playwright which supports many browsers? > Cross-browser. Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. https://playwright.dev/

I said this in a subthread:

> I think Playwright depends on forking the browsers to support the features they need, so that may be less stable than using a standard explicitly supported by the browsers, and/or more representative of realistic browser use.

(And for Safari/WebKit to support it as well, but I'm not holding my breath for that one.) Though I hope Playwright will adopt BiDi at some point as well, as its testing features and API are really nice.

Re: Puppeteer Support for Firefox

#30

Post by yoavm »

I know this isn't what the WebDriver BiDi protocol is for, but I feel like it's 90% there to being a protocol through which you can create browsers, with swappable engines. Gecko has gone a long way since Servo, and it's actually quite performant these days. The sad thing is that it's so much easier to create a Chromium-based browser than it is to create a Gecko based one. But with APIs for navigating, intercepting requests, reading the console, executing JS - why not just embed the thing, remove all the browser chrome around it, and let us create customized browsers?
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