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hugs 12 hours ago

> I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now

i'll politely pushback a little. i think it's safe (at this moment in time) to say: playwright wins the first derivative, but selenium wins the "area under the curve". selenium is very entrenched in many parts of the world, especially outside of SF/USA. part of the inbound interest i've been getting for vibium is from those selenium users who want some kind of bridge to the future, but didn't have an obvious path forward beyond "dump selenium, adopt playwright"...

part of my plan with vibium post-v1 is to give that massive (and it truly is massive, i'm not bragging) installed base of selenium users an upgrade path to more agentic coding options.

999900000999 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you solo developing vibium ?

Playwright really simplifies getting setup. It won't work for everyone, but within 30 seconds Playwright will download it's needed browsers along with a test runner.

I also find the documentation is much better/consolidated.

Definitely open to helping you out if I can be of assistance.

hugs 11 hours ago | parent [-]

"npm install vibium" installs the needed browser on install.

right now, code-wise -- for the code you see in github at the moment -- it's just me and my ai pal, claude. but there's a growing cast of (human!) characters also helping with all the other things we need to do to run a successful project. patches and tokens welcome!

steve_adams_86 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Selenium is distinctly more popular among scientists in my experience. I've only seen playwright at startups.

999900000999 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've personally implemented Playwright in a large enterprise company. Puppeteer before that.

Generally if you have a lot of legacy selenium scripts it's probably not worth it to switch everything over, but if you're creating a new UI automation framework I've just never seen selenium as a first choice for that.

Don't get me wrong it's still solid technology though.

therunninglight 3 hours ago | parent [-]

yes, i've noticed some tendency for [agentic] qa services to go the puppeteer and then playwright route (sometimes either or). it's almost too easy to get running with pw. and, hence, enticing for any startup that wants to get off the ground asap and break even. seems vibium may tap into that startup market as it matures.

legacy selenium suites are a strong contender for vibium adoption. i think hugs has been surveying a ton of folks, he may have a better bird's eye view of the potential user base.

as for academic use of selenium, we have boni garcia - maker/popularizer or selenium webdriver manager teaching at a uni in spain. (maybe an isolated example, but he's rather known in the community)

therunninglight 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

same in my experience.

jjmarr 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Selenium was a part of my degree. I had a course involving it.