5 posts tagged with "Playwright"

Flutter is popular for building cross-platform applications from a single codebase. The same Dart code can target Android, iOS, desktop, and the web. But when it comes to end-to-end testing Flutter web apps, teams often hit a frustrating problem:

"Why can't Selenium or Playwright see my buttons, text fields, dropdowns, and labels?"

The short answer: many Flutter web apps render the UI into a canvas instead of exposing normal HTML elements. That changes how testing needs to be approached.

This post explains how Flutter web works internally, why the DOM is often not useful for automation, and practical options for testing — including how the DevAssure O2 agent unlocks the Flutter DOM for element-level automation and applies visual reasoning over the canvas when selectors are unavailable. If you are new to canvas automation, start with our guides on canvas test automation and Flutter web automation without image-based hacks.

Playwright is one of the best browser automation frameworks ever built. It is fast, reliable, developer-friendly, and powerful. If your team knows exactly what to test, how the UI is structured, which locators are stable, and who will maintain the tests forever, Playwright is an excellent choice.

But that is also the problem.

Most product teams do not struggle because Playwright is weak. They struggle because writing and maintaining browser tests is still manual engineering work:

• Every test needs scripts.
• Every script needs locators.
• Every locator can break.
• Every UI change needs test maintenance.
• Every failure needs someone to investigate whether the app is broken or the test is broken.

At some point, the test suite becomes another codebase to maintain.

Agent-based testing changes this model. Instead of writing scripts that tell the browser exactly what to click, type, and assert, you give the agent an objective. The agent understands the application, interacts with the UI, adapts to changes, validates behavior, and reports issues.

That is why developers should start moving away from writing Playwright tests manually.

Automation Is Changing—Fast​

For the last decade, browser automation has mostly meant:

write selectors → write assertions → maintain scripts forever

Playwright evolved this model with fast execution, cross-browser support, auto-wait, trace viewer, API and web in one tool. But even Playwright is still fundamentally deterministic.

HTTP Basic Authentication is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. It prompts users with a browser dialog box to enter their username and password before granting access to a web resource. Unlike standard web login forms that are part of the webpage, Basic Auth uses a browser-level popup, which can be tricky to automate in end-to-end testing frameworks like Playwright.

In today's fast paced development landscape, it's crucial to ensure the email functionality within your application works seamlessly. Emails are included in various flows of the application to enhance user experience - confirmation emails to validate the email id during sign ups, email OTP for logins, password resets, notifications to end users, or transactional emails. Bugs in emails can prevent new users from signing up or existing users to churn away. In this blog post, we'll explore how you can integrate MailSlurp with Playwright for robust email testing and introduce DevAssure—a next-generation platform that takes email testing to a whole new level.