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…
If I wanted to write some simple web-automation as a DevOps engineer with little javascript (or webdev experience at all) what tool would you recommend? Some example use cases would be writing some basic tests to validate a UI or automate some form-filling on a javascript based website with no API.
Use playwright's code generator that turns turn page interactions into code.
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 r…
I have dreamed about a swappable engine.
Like, a wrapper that does my history and tabs and book marks - but let's me move from rendering in Chrome or Gecko or Servo or whatever.
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.
I think this is where personal problem solving skills matter. I use ChatGPT to start off a lot of new ideas or projects with unfamiliar tools or libraries I will be using, however the result isn't always good. From here, a good developer will take the information from the A.I tool and look further into current documentation to supplement.
If you can't distinguish bad from good with LLMs, you might as well be throwing crap at the wall hoping it will stick.
I've found Firefox to produce better PDFs than Chrome does, for what it's worth. There are some CSS properties that Chrome/Skia doesn't honour properly (e.g. repeating-linear-gradient) or ends up generating PDFs from that don't work universally.
Indeed, Firefox uses PDF.js which I've found to produce really good results.
Doesn't PDF.js go the other way (convert a PDF into HTML-and-friends for display in a browser, instead of "printing" a page into a PDF)?
I haven't dug into it and am quite possibly incorrect, hence the request for confirmation!
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 r…
I have dreamed about a swappable engine. Like, a wrapper that does my history and tabs and book marks - but let's me move from rendering in Chrome or Gecko or Servo or whatever.
There used to be an extension for Firefox called "IE Tab for Firefox" that used the IE rendering engine inside a Firefox tab, for sites that only worked in IE.
I have dreamed about a swappable engine. Like, a wrapper that does my history and tabs and book marks - but let's me move from rendering in Chrome or Gecko or Servo or whatever.
There used to be an extension for Firefox called "IE Tab for Firefox" that used the IE rendering engine inside a Firefox tab, for sites that only worked in IE.
The same idea with built in Internet Explorer in Microsoft Edge, where you can switch to Internet Explorer mode and open website that only correctly works in Internet Exlorer
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.
I think this is where personal problem solving skills matter. I use ChatGPT to start off a lot of new ideas or projects with unfamiliar tools or libraries I will be using, however the result isn't always good. From here, a good developer will take the information from the A.I tool and look further into current documentation to supplement. If you can't distinguish bad from good with LLMs, you might as well be throwing…
>If you can't distinguish bad from good with LLMs, you might as well be throwing crap at the wall hoping it will stick.
This is why I think LLMs are more of a tool for the expert rather than for the novice.
They give more speedup the more experience one has on the subject in question. An experienced dev can usually spot bad advice with little effort, while a junior dev might believe almost any advice due to the lack of experience to question things. The same goes for asking the right questions.
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.
I think this is where personal problem solving skills matter. I use ChatGPT to start off a lot of new ideas or projects with unfamiliar tools or libraries I will be using, however the result isn't always good. From here, a good developer will take the information from the A.I tool and look further into current documentation to supplement. If you can't distinguish bad from good with LLMs, you might as well be throwing…
This is where I tell younger people thinking about getting into computer science or development that there is still a huge need for those skills. I think AI is a long way off from taking away problem solving skills. Most of us that have had the (dis)pleasure of needing to repeatedly change and build on our prompts to get close to what we're looking for will be familiar with this. Without the general problem solving skills we've developed, at best we're going to luck out and get just the right solution, but more than likely will at best have a solution that only gets partially towards what we actually need. Solutions will often be inefficient or subtly wrong in ways that still require knowledge in the technology/language being produced by the LLM. I even tell my teenage son that if he really does enjoy coding and wishes to pursue it as a career, that he should go for it. I shouldn't be, but I'm constantly astounded by the number of people that take output from a LLM without checking for validity.
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?
Maybe you don't want to live in a world where Microsoft owns everything (again)?