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 Firefox web browser Selenium needs geckodriver to be installed. Without it a generic exception will be raised:
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'geckodriver' executable needs to be in PATH.
This can also mean that the geckodriver is installed but Selenium can't find it. To fix this the geckodriver location should be added to the PATH environment variable:
$ export PATH=$PATH:/location/where/geckodriver/is/
Alternatively, we can specify the driver directly in the Selenium initiation code:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'your\path\geckodriver.exe')
driver.get('https://scrapfly.io/')
This knowledgebase is provided by Scrapfly data APIs, check us out! 👇
Explore the key differences between Playwright vs Selenium in terms of performance, web scraping, and automation testing for modern web applications.
Quick overview of new emerging tech of browser automation - what exactly are these tools and how are they used in web scraping?
Discover how to use headless Firefox with Selenium, Playwright, and Puppeteer for web scraping, including practical examples for each library.
In this guide, we'll explore web scraping with Selenium Wire. We'll define what it is, how to install it, and how to use it to inspect and manipulate background requests.