Playwright

Intro

Playwright is an open-source test automation framework that is designed to automate the testing of web applications across different browsers and platforms. It was developed by Microsoft and provides a unified API for automating interactions with web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Launched at the start of 2020, it effectively replaced Puppeteer (developed by the same team) and has rapidly overtaken Cypress and Selenium in many modern agile shops due to its native browser support and speed.

Playwright allows developers and QA engineers to write tests in popular programming languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and C#. It provides a rich set of features for automating browser actions, including navigating to web pages, interacting with page elements, submitting forms, and capturing screenshots.

One of the key advantages of Playwright is its ability to automate tests across multiple browser engines. It supports Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge), WebKit-based browsers (Safari), and Gecko-based browsers (Firefox). This ensures that your web application behaves consistently across different browsers and helps catch any browser-specific bugs or issues.

Playwright also provides features for handling browser contexts, cookies, and network requests, as well as advanced capabilities like intercepting and modifying network traffic. It supports headless execution, which allows tests to run without a visible browser window, making it suitable for running tests in a continuous integration (CI) environment.

Overall, Playwright simplifies the process of writing and maintaining automated tests for web applications, providing a powerful and flexible framework for browser automation.

Playwright: Since it runs in the browser, it needs an "Istanbul middleman" (vite-plugin-istanbul) to save coverage to a .nyc_output folder