I'm looking for recommendations on the fastest browser automation tools available. I've used TestCafe, Cypress, Selenium, and Playwright, and while Playwright has a great developer experience, I notice latency increases each time I update our version. I wonder if I'm missing something crucial in optimizing our build environment for better performance. What have you guys experienced and what tools do you prefer?
3 Answers
Another tip is to mock third-party requests using page.route(). API calls can really slow down your test suite more than the tool itself. If you can block or mock those requests, it can significantly reduce overall run time.
Playwright is definitely the quickest one I've come across too, but the increasing latency on updates often comes from Chromium version changes rather than Playwright itself. I found that pinning the browser version and reusing browser contexts instead of launching new browser instances for every test has saved me a lot of time. The difference between starting cold and connecting to a running instance can be 3-4 seconds, which really adds up when running tests in parallel.
Whoa, that’s super helpful, I’ll definitely check that out.
I misunderstood your point initially. I thought you were saying each test was starting a new browser instance, but we actually already reuse logged-in contexts.
In my experience, Playwright outperforms Selenium by a long shot. The auto-wait feature helps with flakiness and running tests in parallel is straightforward. Just a heads up, the API can change frequently, which occasionally breaks tests when upgrading, but the speed benefits are totally worth it.
That's a great point! We don’t have many third-party scripts, but I’ll keep that in mind.