All about Playwright (JS Party #253)

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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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Sponsors:

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Featuring:

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

Chapters

1. Opener (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Square (00:00:19)

https://changelog.com/square

3. It's party time, y'all! (00:01:12)

https://changelog.social

4. Welcome Debbie! (00:02:02)

5. Getting to know Debbie (00:03:03)

6. Where is Mallorca? (00:03:34)

7. Life before Microsoft (00:04:02)

8. Playwright is like the Beatles... (00:05:18)

9. What is Playright? (00:06:09)

https://playwright.dev

10. The origin of the name "Playwright" (00:08:35)

11. Why fork Puppeteer? (00:09:43)

12. Playwright's value proposition (00:11:29)

13. Test isolation is the answer (00:14:24)

14. Don't sleep on auto-waiting (00:16:14)

15. No Selenium legacy here (00:17:24)

16. Sponsor: Sentry (00:19:21)

https://sentry.io/demo/sandbox/

17. More on multi-browser support (00:20:13)

18. Please explain this black magic! (00:23:57)

19. What about older browsers? (00:24:54)

20. Debugging straight from the browser (00:26:45)

21. "Nick's Playwright Infomercial" (00:28:38)

22. On Playwright's release videos (00:31:09)

23. The VS Code extension (00:34:26)

https://playwright.dev/docs/getting-started-vscode

24. Talkin' 'bout code generation (00:34:54)

25. Nick's beloved TypeScript (00:39:07)

26. Sponsor: Ship It! (00:39:56)

https://shipit.show

27. The Trace Viewer (00:41:25)

28. Recommended CI practices (00:48:22)

29. Playwright vs Cypress (00:49:43)

30. How to get involved (00:58:02)

31. Debbie's Playwright magic wand (00:59:32)

32. Wrapping up (01:00:24)

33. Outro (01:00:48)