Protractor, another Automation Framework I rightly avoided, is being Deprecated

Expensive lessons learnt for teams that do not use W3C compliant Selenium WebDriver.

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This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.

Protractor, a JavaScript-based end-to-end test automation framework, became quite popular a few years back with the rising of AngularJS. I did a quick review of Protractor and disliked it.

The official news came in April 2021: Protractor is being deprecated. While I feel sorry for the teams that have invested a lot of effort in Protractor, my advice is to convert them into raw Selenium WebDriver with RSpec.

As a developer who worked on free and open-source software, I have respect and sympathy for Protractor developers.

“Deprecating Protractor is not a decision that is taken lightly by the team.”

It is a shame that Protractor developers chose the wrong language (JavaScript) and lacked the right mindset: they thought they were making Selenium syntax easier. However, it ended up with the opposite effect.