All about Playwright

JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development

Debbie O’Brien –Senior Program Manager at Microsoft– joins Amal & Nick for a deep-dive on Playwright, an automation library for cross-browser end-to-end testing. Along the way, we learn why Microsoft decided to fork Puppeteer, Playwright’s unique value proposition, cool features like auto-waiting & the trace viewer, how it compares to Cypress & a lot more.

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Featuring:

• Debbie O'Brien – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Amal Hussein – Twitter, GitHub
• Nick Nisi – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Show Notes:

Shout out to Caio Amaral for requesting this episode. You, too, can request an episode!

• Mallorca
• playwright.dev
• Playwright on GitHub
• Nuxt
• puppeteer
• Selenium
• Playwright test for VSCode
• Getting started - VS Code
• Testing Library
• Playwright on YouTube
• What’s new in Playwright 1.27
• Test Generator
• CI GitHub Actions

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Opener
(00:19) - Sponsor: Square
(01:12) - It's party time, y'all!
(02:02) - Welcome Debbie!
(03:03) - Getting to know Debbie
(03:34) - Where is Mallorca?
(04:02) - Life before Microsoft
(05:18) - Playwright is like the Beatles...
(06:09) - What is Playright?
(08:35) - The origin of the name "Playwright"
(09:43) - Why fork Puppeteer?
(11:29) - Playwright's value proposition
(14:24) - Test isolation is the answer
(16:14) - Don't sleep on auto-waiting
(17:24) - No Selenium legacy here
(19:21) - Sponsor: Sentry
(20:13) - More on multi-browser support
(23:57) - Please explain this black magic!
(24:54) - What about older browsers?
(26:45) - Debugging straight from the browser
(28:38) - "Nick's Playwright Infomercial"
(31:09) - On Playwright's release videos
(34:26) - The VS Code extension
(34:54) - Talkin' 'bout code generation
(39:07) - Nick's beloved TypeScript
(39:56) - Sponsor: Ship It!
(41:25) - The Trace Viewer
(48:22) - Recommended CI practices
(49:43) - Playwright vs Cypress
(58:02) - How to get involved
(59:32) - Debbie's Playwright magic wand
(1:00:24) - Wrapping up
(1:00:48) - Outro