Uploaded October 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Pyppeteer the popular way for Pythonistas to automate their Chrome browsers by wrapping the Google Puppeteer JavaScript package is losing ground to Microsoft Playwright which is a very powerful fork of Puppeteer. It's so powerful a fork it hired away 2 lead Puppeteer developers. Microsoft taketh away and Microsoft giveth back, here in the form of an official Python library with Playwright.
Microsoft Playwright even has an optional simpler synchronous mode for Python. Wait what? I can dump async await? Not so fast! If you want to use it in JupyterLab you're going to have to stay in asynchronous mode. But you can use asnyc mode with the context manager, which seems like a perfect match and a great way for Pythonistas to wrap their mind around it.
Oh yeah, and even though this whole demonstration is on Microsoft Windows, the JupyterLab is being hosted by a local Linux LXD container and all the pop-up automated browsers are the Linux versions of Chrome.
Pyppeteer the popular way for Pythonistas to automate their Chrome browsers by wrapping the Google Puppeteer JavaScript package is losing ground to Microsoft Playwright which is a very powerful fork of Puppeteer. It's so powerful a fork it hired away 2 lead Puppeteer developers. Microsoft taketh away and Microsoft giveth back, here in the form of an official Python library with Playwright.
Microsoft Playwright even has an optional simpler synchronous mode for Python. Wait what? I can dump async await? Not so fast! If you want to use it in JupyterLab you're going to have to stay in asynchronous mode. But you can use asnyc mode with the context manager, which seems like a perfect match and a great way for Pythonistas to wrap their mind around it.
Oh yeah, and even though this whole demonstration is on Microsoft Windows, the JupyterLab is being hosted by a local Linux LXD container and all the pop-up automated browsers are the Linux versions of Chrome.
