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.
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Thanks for sharing this, I’m currently exploring options for automating tests for a WPF application. I’ve been looking into Appium and WinAppDriver as possible routes, though I’ve heard mixed things about how well WinAppDriver plays with Windows 11. Ideally I’m trying to stick with free or low‑budget tools. Is that something you’ve worked with before? I’d be really interested to hear what tooling you’ve found reliable for WPF UI automation.

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I’ve not toyed with nor investigated WPF/Windows 11 automation, but I follow the landscape news since it’s an area of interest for me and I used to do QA automation, in case I ever get back to it.

I doubt WinAppDriver has good support going forwards given it’s kind of a deprecated/obsolete tool in terms of maintenance and updates. But there are alternative tooling that might be of use like FlaUI. There are others but you have to research. FlaUI seems to be the most noteworthy/promising. It even has a wrapper for WebDriver interface via a 3rd party project.

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That kind of at least happened or neglect from Microsoft for WinAppDriver. That project is on github with a community, but they never open sourced the source code. If they did, at least the community can take over where/when MS abandoning it.

Hopefully Playwright does’t have that kind of issue with respect to source code for community takeover/handover.

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Thanks for sharing this, it’s a really helpful starting point. I’ve begun looking into FlaUI and it definitely seems promising. I still need to dig around a bit more, but it does feel harder to find solid information on desktop app automation compared to everything available for web testing. Your pointers have given me a clearer direction to explore, so I really appreciate it.