RachelWebsite testing is extremely important not only during the initial build but progressively with time to make continuous improvements. Testers and developers are in search to write scalable, reliable, and fast test automation. Various new automation tools are routinely appearing in the market that help testers to save time and increase efficiency, test coverage, and execution speed in testing. Selenium has been heading effectively unchallenged and continued as the preferred one in test automation tools.
Recently a newly arrived competitor has entered into the world of test automation, which is Playwright. Testers and developers have frequently used this automated testing framework to ensure that their website is functioning correctly. For Example testing the login process, the search functioning, or the checkout flow so that the users get a positive experience.
One of the most preferred parts of Playwright is that it is not just for website automation testing but also includes developing mobile apps and it’s testing. Testers can integrate it with their existing developmental workflow because it can integrate with most of the popular development tools.
In this article we will be discussing the Playwright automation framework, what are its features, why it is essential, and why it is preferred over other proprietary automation frameworks. Let’s begin with the definition and its features.
Introduction to Playwright
The playwright is an open-source web automation library. It is a complete standalone solution that supports all major browsers like Chromium for Chrome and Edge, Webkit for Safari, and Gecko for Firefox. It allows the creation of powerful, stable automated test scripts in multiple programming languages like Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, and NodeJS. Some of the important features it provides are screenshots, videos, and execution trace support.
It is developed by the team behind Puppeteer (a headless testing framework for Chrome/Chromium) and maintained by Microsoft. The playwright is relatively new compared to the Selenium automation framework but rapidly picking up steam. It provides cross-browser, cross-language, and cross-platform, through a single API.
The playwright is a Node.Js library that includes helpful and newer features like auto-waiting, multiple browser support, and capabilities that are more aligned with the modern web. It is exclusively engineered for end-to-end automated testing for the current web app and generally runs very quickly, even for complex testing projects.
The playwright is a powerful tool to check how the application will look in different browsers and devices by capturing screenshots of the component, in various browsers and different viewports. It allows testing the best rendering resolutions and headers, viewports, device capabilities, and more. It helps the testers to deploy their apps safely by detecting any unexpected changes on that specific component.
Some of the highlighted features of the Playwright are-
- It can be run against all major browsers (Chromium/Chrome, Firefox, WebKit/Safari).
- Allows writing reliable, fast, and more concise scripts to minimize the need for explicit waits.
- Support cross-browser platforms like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
- Cross-platform execution on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Multi-programming language support such as JavaScript & TypeScript, Python, .NET, C#, and Java.
- Built-in auto-wait, smart assertions, and test data tracing to easily keep track of logs, videos, and snapshots.
- Ability to interact with multiple-page, multiple-tab websites similar to a real user.
- Capability to easily tackle frames and browser events.
- Executes tests parallely faster than other automation tools.
Why choose Playwright?
The playwright mimics the actions of a manual tester and automatically generates test scripts that help to reduce the tester’s time and effort required to test. The playwright is specifically used to simulate user interactions, test logic from the server side, and verify data accuracy.
The playwright addresses issues like slow test execution, inaccurate wait scenarios, the need to write a lot of code for browser setup, parallel execution, etc,. It makes tests more readable, fast, and reliable.
The playwright framework is an addition to automation test tools. Being novel to the market it is still rapidly building its popularity by regularly receiving improvements and updates. The playwright has become one of the most favored frameworks among testers and developers for test automation.
Playwright’s main use cases
- Used to test modern web applications to verify that features exposed to the users are performing as expected.
- Perform cross-browser testing and ensure that applications are rendering consistently across all browsers and engines.
- To perform visual testing, take screenshots of web pages.
- Used for scratching websites for data to retrieve or analyze them later.
- Used to automate the interaction of web pages to speed up and scale the sequence of actions performed on a website.
Why choose Playwright over other Automation Frameworks
Although Playwright is new to the market it is very much active in announcing new features. It does not restrict any programming language since it supports C#, Java, Python, and more. Playwright allows the simulation of more insightful and relevant user scenarios. It does not rely on a middle translation layer, instead directly sees into and controls the browser. Some of its top features are discussed below
1. Auto-Waiting
Instead of controlling the waiting-through code in test scripts, Playwright auto-waits for UI elements to be available before performing certain actions. This makes the test simple and helps in avoiding the extra steps of adding explicit waits. This results in making the tests more consistent and easier to maintain.
2. Browser Support
Playwright Currently Supports Chromium family browsers (Chrome, Edge), Firefox, and a Web toolkit (Safari). This helps the testers to write test cases once and execute them across all browsers with no or minimal configuration.
3. Browser Contexts
Playwright’s Browser contexts help to achieve parallelization by running tests simultaneously with multiple browsers. This feature comes in handy when multiple web pages must be tested simultaneously. It also allows the simulation of incognito sessions and multi-page scenarios within a browser. This allows for testing of persistent sessions between tabs to ensure the website’s functioning in incognito mode.
4. Easy Setup and Configuration:
The playwright installation is easy and does not take much time. Once the line of code gets executed, Playwright automatically downloads binaries for all 3 supported browsers, and with a single command, the setup gets ready for web automation. It is to keep in mind that the installation steps may change depending on the language used by the Playwright.
5. Authentication
A typical element of web frameworks is authentication. Playwright permits a single login and saves session information and cookies in the context. This eliminates the need for numerous logins because it may be used across all tests inside that context once it has been stored. To be used across context objects, this code must be included in setup files (in the case of Jest) or test fixtures (in the case of playwright-test runner).
6. Generate PDF
The playwright can be used to generate PDFs from web pages. This distinguishes it from other frameworks in some way. This makes it possible to automate a variety of processes, including archiving, creating invoicing, authoring manuals and publications, and more.
7. Network Control and permissions
By simulating file uploads and downloads, managing various authentication methods, intercepting network requests, and mocking out request responses, Test scripts can change the environmental conditions for the application being tested. User options such as switching the color scheme to dark mode or printing and permissions like alerts and geolocations can be enabled and mimicked.
Running the Playwright test on LambdaTest
Without a doubt, Playwright provides quick testing in headless architecture for sophisticated web applications and just requires NodeJS as a precondition. However, being still new it lacks support on various levels such as limited coverage, community support, browsers, real devices, language options, and integrations.
But when the architecture is very complex with limited range, then Playwright is the best option to choose for testing. It is important to note that whatever test automation framework is chosen, it must guarantee that the website delivers a seamless and consistent user experience irrespective of the device and browser used to access them. For that, cross-browser testing is mandatory.
Cross-browser automation testing allows testers to test the web applications on multiple browsers simultaneously with instant feedback. It also helps to ensure that the application works consistently across different browsers and operating systems.
Playwright Test Runner is utilized for end-to-end automated testing of websites and web apps across all major browsers. Testers can leverage fixtures with the Playwright test runner, run parallel tests, and collect videos, pictures, and other test items when a test fails.
LambdaTest is a cloud-based testing platform that allows testers to run Playwright test scripts across a range of 50+ actual browsers with a combination of multiple operating systems with instant hassle-free parallelization. All of the features of Playwright are supported by LambdaTest. Running Playwright scripts on this platform the teams get out-of-the-box capabilities.
With LambdaTest testers just need to focus on testing as it saves the testers from the overhead of setting up and maintaining an in-house infrastructure. LambdaTest is a cross-browser compatibility testing platform that provides 3000+ real browsers, devices, and operating systems with their respective versions for instant, on-demand testing.
It also offers a cloud Selenium grid for selenium automated testing, that can be enhanced with parallel testing. LambdaTest can be seamlessly integrated with popular CI/CD tools such as Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, and much more. Additionally, the in-built debugging tools help the testers to find and fix bugs immediately.
Conclusion
The playwright is not restricted only to the above-mentioned features, instead, it gives other notable features to users, which stands for Playwright as a unique framework. Other noteworthy features it includes are iframe support, support for page object pattern, built-in reporters, shadow DOM, automatic waiting, support for third-party test runner, videos and screenshot support, browser emulator, test retry, parameterized project, etc. We cannot stop expecting additional enhancement because the Playwright is so eagerly releasing features and addressing problems.
Julia
