"npm install vibium" installs the needed browser on install.
right now, code-wise -- for the code you see in github at the moment -- it's just me and my ai pal, claude. but there's a growing cast of (human!) characters also helping with all the other things we need to do to run a successful project. patches and tokens welcome!
it's just v1. good for experimenting, not for production (yet!).
and yes, it's perhaps impolite and silently taboo for me to say it out loud, but "not being controlled by microsoft" is on the top 10 list of "why vibium and not playwright". most of the sf world has gone all-in on playwright; i'm betting on web standards. i hope people will notice that distinction. however, i realize vibium can't win just as the "not microsoft" option; it will also need to win on the merits.
microsoft is already incredibly well-positioned to own the whole dev stack. from their investment in openai to vscode, github, and playwright... they are in a powerful position. i'm old enough to remember the last time ms had massive power over the stack (see: internet explorer 6).
Not to mention they own NPM( GitHub owns NPM).
C# is fantastic and Playwright's C# support is extremely good. I've been in the C# ecosystem for years, but I'm still a bit worried about having a single company control so much of my livelihood. Let's just say I have a little bit of experience with Microsoft, they don't particularly pay well so I'm a little confused as to if they can maintain so many frameworks indefinitely.
Are you going to keep Vibium a community project, or you hoping to raise capital/bootstrap.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love what you're doing but I don't know if one person can create something so complex. The good news is Chrome is the only browser most normal people use, which reduces the amount of testing you have to actually do.
At the vast majority of places I've worked at we basically just test on Chrome and then if it doesn't work on other browsers ohh well. Every now and then you would get a project manager who would suggest adding Firefox/Safari testing. But it's never been a priority.
Would you suggest Vibium as ready for production use?
On second thought not being controlled by Microsoft might be good enough to differentiate it from playwright. It's not a good idea for a single company to control so much.
I'm thinking their needs to be an easy way to sandbox vibe automation. I don't want to accidentally click an ad and vibe test an unrelated website .