Playwright (software)

Playwright is an open-source automation library for browser testing and web scraping developed by Microsoft and launched on 31 January 2020, which has since become popular among programmers and web developers.

Playwright provides the ability to automate browser tasks in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. This allows developers to create reliable end-to-end tests that are capable of running in non-headless mode, as well as in headless mode for automation. Playwright has been compared to Cypress.

Playwright supports programming languages like JavaScript, Python, C# and Java, though its main API was originally written in Node.js. It supports all modern web features including network interception and multiple browser contexts and provides automatic waiting, which reduces the flakiness of tests.

@playwright/test
@playwright/test is a test runner with Jest-like assertions developed and maintained by the Playwright team that is built on top of the Playwright API. This test runner is tightly integrated with Playwright and is specifically designed for end-to-end testing. It has capabilities like browser-specific tests, parallel test execution, rich browser context options, snapshot testing, automatic retries and many more.

History
Playwright was announced by Microsoft in January 2020. It was developed by a team of engineers who had previously worked on similar projects like Puppeteer at Google. Since its inception, Playwright has been actively maintained and has seen rapid growth and adoption in the web testing community

The @playwright/test runner was released later as part of an effort to provide a more comprehensive solution for browser-based testing. Its development was largely based on the need to have a specialized runner that can leverage the full potential of the Playwright API and make end-to-end testing more robust and straightforward.

Usage and Examples
Playwright is primarily used for automating browser tasks, which can range from simple page navigation and content scraping to more complex operations like automated form submissions, user interactions and more. For instance, a simple JavaScript code snippet using Playwright might look like:

In this example, Playwright is used to open a Chromium browser, navigate to 'https://example.com', take a screenshot and save it as 'example.png'.

@playwright/test further extends these capabilities by providing a test runner that allows developers to write and organize their tests in a more structured and scalable manner. An example test using @playwright/test might look like:

In this example, a test is written to navigate to 'https://example.com' and check if the title of the page is 'Example Domain'.

Reception
Both Playwright and @playwright/test have been well received by the developer community. They are praised for their robustness, speed and widely used in the industry, playing an important role in web application testing and development.