selenium-python-helium VS webdriver-bidi

I don't get why people still use XPaths, CSS selectors or HTML IDs to identify elements, even when they are "recorded". Please please please just use my https://github.com/mherrmann/selenium-python-helium instead. It makes so much more sense.

You can, though it might not be the best tool for this. Automation of web entry is better done with selenium, or my favorite variation helium.

Regarding automatic selectors: check out my open source library https://github.com/mherrmann/selenium-python-helium.

quick example https://github.com/mherrmann/selenium-python-helium

If this all fails you'll have to fall back on a web driver like selenium or one of its wrappers like helium.

Simplest would probably be not using Selenium directly, but a wrapper like helium. Most of its functions you'd need are listed here.

If you're talking about CSS I reckon you want to click/input things on a website inside your browser. In this case you would use a web driver which can automate a web browser like Chrome or Firefox. Something like Helium, Selenium or pyppeteer.

fwiw, the Selenium project is now old enough to go to college (19 years this month!); it's not ready to retire just yet. (Side-note: Google Chrome is 15 years old. Age is just a number.) Selenium is still learning from other projects and implementing some new things. Specifically, check out the WebDriver BiDi project, adding a bidirectional protocol which was the core of what made Playwright and Puppeteer faster. Also, Selenium devs are working with the W3C to make this work for everyone.

https://github.com/w3c/webdriver-bidi

https://w3c.github.io/webdriver-bidi/

Is this new WebDriver BiDi available in any of these packages, and does it actually help with this?

If you want to learn more about WebDriver BiDi, you can read the WebDriver BiDi specification.

I guess I didn't understand what exactly you were talking about when talking about "this new standard": WebDriver BiDi or WebContainers.

WebDriver BiDi is on the standards track, that's true: https://w3c.github.io/webdriver-bidi/

One of the new features in the recently released Selenium 4 is support for new event-driven listeners which will be powered by the currently-in-draft BiDirectional (or BiDi) protocol (though the current Selenium implementation has some limitations, which we'll discuss later). In this article we'll discuss some of these new capabilities and demonstrate how to use them in Scala to inspect console logs and network requests made from the browser.

The new BiDirectional WebDriver Protocol is by far one of the most exciting recent developments in the Selenium project and it likely to deliver improvements in speed and stability that far outweigh expectations. As soon as it is available, it will become part of Nightwatch as well. You can follow the development on the Selenium website.

The explainer might be a better starting point: https://github.com/w3c/webdriver-bidi/blob/master/explainer....

There's also the webdriver-bidi spec being worked on by browser vendors that may provide a less hacky, more browser native CDP-style approach to this.