Playwright VS qtwebkit

4.Playwright: Playwright is a browser automation library by Microsoft. Key Features: Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Provides cross-browser testing capabilities. Allows automating web, mobile, and desktop applications

HTML to PDF conversion is a common requirement in modern web applications. It allows users to save web pages, reports, and other content in a format that is easy to share and print. There are many libraries and services available for converting HTML to PDF, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we will compare some of the most popular HTML to PDF renderers in Node.js, including Puppeteer, Playwright, node-html-pdf, and Onedoc.

Playwright [ https://playwright.dev/ ] ✅

Playwright seems to be a superior library for working with headless browsers than Puppeteer, but I will go with Puppeteer.

Playwright is a Node.js library for automating browsers. It allows you to write scripts to interact with web pages, just like a real user would. You can use it to fill out forms, click buttons, and navigate between pages. It is most commonly used for end-to-end testing of the code-base, but it's also a great tool for monitoring continuously.

I tend to agree. An example of how it can be net-zero gain is in this screenshot[1]. To have something maintainable, you have to do your own refactoring pass on the generated code. At that point, it's not much effort to write the test yourself than it is to refactor all of the redundancies.

1. https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/assets/13063165/7794...

If you ever find that you need to automate some browsing and Selenium comes to your mind, banish that thought! :)

Do yourself a favour, use Playwright instead.

https://playwright.dev/

It's a headless browser that's both faster and less flaky than Selenium.

Playwright is a relatively new but powerful node library for browser automation. Developed by Microsoft, it enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-reliable for end-to-end testing. Playwright is compatible with all modern web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and offers capabilities for both headless and non-headless browser testing.

Hah yeah that's confusing.

https://playwright.dev/python/docs/intro is actually the documentation for pytest-playwright - their pytest plugin.

https://playwright.dev/python/docs/library is the documentation for their automation library.

I just filed an issue pointing out that this is confusing. https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/29579

Playwright is the fastest growing web testing framework. Playwright enables end-to-end (E2E) tests to be created by synthetically driving a headless browser session and enabling assertions to verify the system performs as expected. With Playwright traces, you can review a test after the script has run and identify exactly what occurred.

Not so ancient - Otter uses QtWebKit 5.212 from Mar 10, 2020.

AFAIK, Otter Browser uses the latest QtWebkit-ng on Windows. It scores 341 points in HTML5Test. There is also an experimental Qt WebEngine backend.

I am aware that there is an independent project to keep QtWebkit alive but this one also seems to have been discontinued since ~2020.

Otter Browser is based on QtWebKit-NG, which is from 2020, so still relevant. That said, you can use the nightly WebKit build from Playwright: https://i.postimg.cc/Fz7FwRQW/Playwright.png

Otter Browser is not that outdated, it is based on QtWebKit-NG, which was updated in 2020.

Lastly, the other webkit based project, QtWebkit. It is also very lightweight and fast, It also provides a cross-platform render and It has access to the system dialogs. The down side is that you will have to make a Qt App to use it. If you don't want to implement it, then you cannot use It

> I hate that it's based on Chromium though

There aren't really many alternatives. The main one is WebKitGTK, but that comes with its own set of issues (mostly performance/compatibility). You can use qutebrowser with QtWebKit as well, but I wouldn't recommend it - it's based on a 2018 WebKit with many known security issues: https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

I had hoped for Servo to fill that gap at some point, but so far that hasn't happened yet: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/27579

Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64

> and Qutebrowser privacy related settings also seem quite limited compared to Firefox... (and even compared to Chromium.)

Can you be more specific? Pretty much anything that's possible to expose (either via a QtWebEngine API or via Chromium commandline arguments) is exposed. Certain things (like deleting cookies belonging to a tab when it's closed) just aren't possible without implementing them in QtWebEngine first unfortunately.

FWIW there's an overview here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4045

Note that Otter Browser uses QtWebKit by default, which is based on a 2018 WebKit with many known security issues: https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

and Qt has mostly moved to qtwebengine/blink. qt-webkit is sort-of-not-really maintained by very few volunteers. https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

While you can still use it with QtWebKit instead, I wouldn't recommend doing so, as that's still based on a 2018 WebKit with no process isolation or sandboxing.