Selenium vs X, Y, Z, …, all these years

Stop comparing, just do real web test automation with raw Selenium WebDriver. All web automation frameworks compared to Selenium are later proved to be the losers.

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

Today, I noticed a LinkedIn update on an Applitools’ webinar (2021–12–10): “Selenium vs. Playwright”.

I did not watch it, and I will explain the reasons shortly.

On this webinar info page,

“we have long-time reigning champ: Selenium WebDriver”

then it will be followed by the introduction of the so-called relatively new framework: Playwright.

Here I want to highlight one perspective that many people might have missed, why is it always Selenium vs X all these years?! (The Xs, see below, all proved losers later)

• Selenium vs QTP/UFT
  Examples: Software Testing Genius (2011), Software Testing Magazine (2013)
  Fact: Micro Focus became a selenium sponsor of the Selenium project, and released a product (UFT developer) to support Selenium.
• Selenium vs Protractor
  Example: Applitools (2014), its first sentence, “is Protractor easier than Selenium?, Yes”. Of course, that’s not true.
  Fact: Protractor has been deprecated.
  Protractor strictly is a wrapper of WebDriverJS, not a framework. This proves my point: Raw Selenium WebDriver (not using JavaScript) is better. Check out my article: “Please, Not Another Web Test Automation Framework, Just Use Raw Selenium WebDriver”.
• Selenium vs Microsoft Coded UI Test
  Example: Spheregen (2015)
  Fact: Microsoft deprecated Coded UI Test in 2018, “We (Microsoft) recommend Selenium WebDriver for testing web apps”.
• Selenium vs Cypress, Puppeteer or TestCafe
  Examples: TestGuild (2017), Gartner (2018)
  
  After seeing every Cypress test automation attempts fail, I wrote the article “Why Cypress Sucks for Real Test Automation?” in 2020. At that time, Cypress was still hot…