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.
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?
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!
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).
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.