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Selenium was very usable before 2011. This post is like saying Grafana and not mentioning Nagios

• nikisweeting 1y ago
  It was, but I feel like the advent of headless browsers marked a step function explosion in browser automation. Also any earlier than 2010 is when I was like 13yo, so it's more like "the dark ages in my own memory" than "objectively dark ages in automation history".
  • patrickhogan1 1y ago
    I get that drawing historical boundaries is arbitrary, but Selenium is a really good prior. Selenium offered headless mode and integrated with 3rd party providers like BrowserStack, which ran acceptance tests in parallel in the cloud. It seems like what browser-use.com is doing is a modern day version with many more features & adaptability.
    • hugs 1y ago
      speaking of priors... sauce labs existed for three whole years before browserstack (selenium and sauce founder here. :-) i like that there are new startups in the space, though. things were getting pretty stale and uninspired.
      • patrickhogan1 1y ago
        Sauce Labs is excellent. I've actually used it extensively myself (not sure why BrowserStack came to mind first). I remember Sauce Labs was super active in the SF Selenium community and the Selenium meetups. Just checked my emails. Good memories. Thank you for building Selenium.
    • nikisweeting 1y ago
      Yeah I agree, I changed the history section a bit: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/2a0f4bd93a43fd43086a47cd2465ad4528399e5d/browser_use/browser/crash_watchdog.py#L318 https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/2a0f4bd93a43...
      • nikisweeting 1y ago
        whoops pasted the wrong link and it's too late to edit. meant to link to the updated article section here: https://browser-use.com/posts/playwright-to-cdp#:~:text=Selenium%20Dominance%20Era https://browser-use.com/posts/playwright-to-cdp#:~:text=Sele...