The most notable example is PhantomJS, which was deprecated by its author in 2018. Eventually, the idea of a headless browser was introduced to tackle those issues. Selenium tests were flaky, unstable, and resource-heavy (the Selenium driver had to rely on full-blown browser instances). It was the de facto choice for a long time (nearly a decade). One of the first pioneers in the market was Selenium, which originated in 2004 and was created by ThoughtWorks. It started in the 2000s with the need for a reliable testing framework to simulate user interactions within a web application’s UI interface. A brief introduction to browser automation historyīrowser automation is not a new concept.

This article will compare two of the most essential automation libraries and demonstrate how easy it is to get started with browser automation using a free service like Browserless.

In recent years the importance of browser automation as a core tool for everything from automating internal tools to web scraping to E2E tests, has led to the birth of several different automation platforms and libraries. What is browser automation?īrowser automation is the process of simulating user-specific tasks on a web browser. Bonus: if you like our content and this “playwright vs puppeteer” article, you can join our web automation Slack community.

Download free puppeteer npm