Why I Switched from Selenium to Playwright

For years, Selenium was the undisputed king of browser automation. But as modern web apps became more complex—heavy on JavaScript, dynamic, and reactive—Selenium started showing its age. Enter Playwright.

Speed and Reliability

The biggest pain point with Selenium was always "flakiness". Tests would fail because an element wasn't rendered yet. Playwright handles this natively with auto-waiting. It waits for elements to be actionable before clicking, reducing flaky tests by over 90% in my experience.

Multi-Tab and Multi-User Support

Playwright Contexts allow you to simulate multiple users in a single test file without spinning up entirely new browser instances. This is a game-changer for testing chat apps or real-time collaboration tools.

# Simple Playwright Example
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright


with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto("http://example.com")
    print(page.title())
    browser.close()

If you are still wrestling with `time.sleep()` in Selenium, it's time to move on.