What is our preferred driver for system specs?

[jaredlt]

There appear to be three main options:

Selenium

• Rails default
• Uses the WebDriver protocol
• Auto-manages browser drivers (the webdrivers gem is no longer needed)
• Drives whatever browser is installed on the machine

Playwright

• Newer option, avoids WebDriver and uses native debugging protocols eg. CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol)
• Requires Node to install the browser. Pins its own Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit builds so versions are consistent across machines and CI
• Slightly faster tests and reduced flakiness are the commonly cited reason teams migrate (I believe this is mostly attributed to CDP vs WebDriver), though through the Capybara DSL you don't get Playwright-native features, like auto-waiting, automatically (there is the option to use Playwright directly but it means skipping Capybara's DSL)

Cuprite

• Pure Ruby, also talks to Chrome over CDP (via Ferrum), no Selenium or WebDriver dependency
• Chromium only, whereas Playwright also covers Firefox and WebKit
• Drives the browser that is installed on the machine
• As Cuprite also uses CDP, the same benefits apply

[jaredlt]

My vote is for Playwright. We've switched to it (from Selenium) on a number of projects and seen reduced flakiness. I'd opt for keeping Capybara as we're familiar with the DSL

Playwright seems to be taking over, not just in Rails. It has a big team behind it (backed by Microsoft).

There are easy set up guides https://justin.searls.co/posts/running-rails-system-tests-with-playwright-instead-of-selenium/

[jaredlt]

With Playwright we could also take advantage of things like Trace Viewer

[jaredlt]

Evil Martians like Cuprite. It's ruby based which feels nice. It's also CDP-based which is where we derive most of the benefits over Selenium's older WebDriver approach.