The Future of Playwright

Discussions
1

How are people interpreting recent changes in the Playwright team in relation to the future of Playwright?

The discussion has mostly around Debbie, but what else is there that we should know?

And also, does this give any insight or concern into the future of testing tools / frameworks in general?

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I feel for Debbie. It doesn’t make any sense but redundancies these days rarely do.

I haven’t heard anything about Playwrights road map changing… There is the shift to workspaces but I’m not sure of the impact of that yet. Is there more insight into the team and how they are further affected?

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I’m unaware of the Playwright landscape, but at least hopefully it continues to be better landscape than what happened to Microsoft’s own/sponsored WinAppDriver GitHub - microsoft/WinAppDriver: Windows Application Driver. That project has been seemingly dead with no updates or info from MS. At least they should do some public relations to provide some closure on that project.

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For azure based solutions there seems to be a shift to playwright work spaces

(Via Sign Up | LinkedIn)

Microsoft has officially confirmed that the Playwright Testing Service (Classic) is being retired.
It will be fully shut down in March, and all teams will need to migrate.

The replacement is Playwright Workspaces, now part of Azure App Testing, which brings Playwright, load testing, and cloud execution into one unified service.

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As I see in the coming months, more companies will adopt Playwright, and one of the reasons is that the new features are being integrated into Playwright at a very fast pace compared to other tools. Mid-level companies usually uses node js for backend and that makes playwright as the first choice for automation.

Legacy projects that are based on Selenium will continue with the same, and there are two most probable reasons for that :

  1. It is not easy to migrate a legacy project to a new tool, and obviously, that tool that gained limelight only 3-4 years ago.
  2. Skepticism regarding the playwright’s future, everyone is aware how Microsoft deals with the market when it comes to its product, it first create monopoly and then licenses the product. As of now playwright is open source, but companies have doubts regarding the playwright being open-sourced in the future also. Like Google control everything in android, similarly microsoft may control it.