Playwright vs Selenium
Explore the key differences between Playwright vs Selenium in terms of performance, web scraping, and automation testing for modern web applications.
Selenium is a popular web browser automation library used for web scraping. To run, however, Selenium needs special web browser executables called drivers. For example, to run Chrome web browser Selenium needs chromedriver to be installed. Without it a generic exception will be raised:
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'chromedriver' executable needs to be in PATH.
This can also mean that the chromedriver is installed but Selenium can't find it. To fix this the chromedriver location should be added to the PATH environment variable:
$ export PATH=$PATH:/location/where/chromedriver/is/
Alternatively, we can specify the driver directly in the Selenium initiation code:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'your\path\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://scrapfly.io/')
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