Comment by saberience

Comment by saberience 5 days ago

13 replies

Talk about "not built here" mentality. This is a project doomed to failure. Using VC money to re-write better built software which has been around for years.

Good luck guys!

johnsmith1840 5 days ago

From their blog its not obvious the value but pure cdp as a framework is powerful for other reasons. If you have very high performace requirements it makes sense.

I build something like an automation system pure cdp to shave ms off. But I'm a real time user interaction system plus automation not pure ai automation.

Doesn't make much sense to shave ms when an LLM call is hundreds of ms ans that's the only "user"

  • nikisweeting 4 days ago

    it does when we have multiple LLMs working in parallel on a single tab, which we're working towards eventually

Tostino 5 days ago

Exactly what I was thinking. Instead of attempting to contribute back to Playwright to fix those hangups, or even creating a private patch to do so as a POC, they went right to building their own framework from scratch.

That isn't how you launch a product.

  • nikisweeting 5 days ago

    I've been trying to contribute to playwright for years! All of my issues have been closed / rejected without much consideration because they're not part of the core "QA testing" use-case that playwright is built for.

    Personally have not found their team to be the easiest to work with on Github. I would've loved to use puppeteer instead, their team is quite reasonable but they abandoned their python bindings and we want to stay in python.

    • hugs 4 days ago

      re: ms -- thank you for calling that out. i've been thinking we had been collectively sleepwalking into ms owning everything (again). they've owned everything once before -- it wasn't great!

      related side-note: have you had to interact with the core chrome / cdp devs?

      • nikisweeting 4 days ago

        Chromium bug tracker is where issues go to die, but aside from that I've had nothing but lovely individual interactions with core chrome devs so far. The devtools frontend/protocol repo is definitely active and more approachable than Chromium itself.

        I have not spoken to people that work directly on CDP yet, but I believe we have a call with them soon!

        • hugs 4 days ago

          awesome! tell them there are dozens of python fans. dozens!

      • gregpr07 4 days ago

        re side-note: if you know anyone who would be willing to interact connect me :)

        • hugs 4 days ago

          i was going to ask the same to you. :-)

          i'm just stubborn enough to find out, though. and i still have a few contacts at the googleplex...

  • mxhwll 4 days ago

    Spoken like someone who has never contributed to open source but just grandstands about how everyone else needs to.

    • nicman23 4 days ago

      spoken like a complete tool that none wants to work with :)

  • gregpr07 5 days ago

    I mean... Playwright was built and is maintained by Microsoft, so I don't think VC money argument really makes sense here.

    By the very nature of how Playwright is built we can't contribute to it - it runs inside a JS subprocess and does not expose a bunch of CDP apis that we NEED (for example to make cross origin iframes work).