Cross-Browser Testing with Playwright: How to Ensure Your Web App Works on Any Browser

Cross-Browser Testing with Playwright :
Since web automation has become more common in the past decade, WebDriver has been the underlying protocol used by tools like Selenium, Protractor and WebdriverIO. Using this protocol, commands are sent from the test script to a specific driver of the test browser. WebDriver has delivered a revolution in web automation, but it has many disadvantages as well.

Developers frequently introduce new tools like Playwright to the market for writing scalable, reliable, and efficient automation. Let’s quickly explore this popular automation framework that can streamline cross-browser tests.

What is Cross Browser testing and Requirement of Cross browser testing

To ensure uniform functionality and appearance, testers perform cross-browser testing on a website or web application across various web browsers and browser versions. Cross-browser testing helps identify and resolve any compatibility problems that may arise because different browsers may interpret and render web content differently.

Cross-browser testing’s main objective is to guarantee that your website or web application functions properly and presents consistently across a variety of browsers frequently used by your target audience. It entails evaluating your website or application across a range of browser configurations, browser iterations, and operating systems.

What is Playwright?

Playwright is an automated web test library that tests any web applications with the most popular browsers: Chromium for Chrome and Edge, Webkit for Safari, and Gecko for Firefox. Test scripts often include Java, JavaScript, Python, C#, and Go. The playwright leverages the DevTools protocol.

Key Features of Playwright

Playwright enables the simulation of more insightful and pertinent user scenarios since it can view and manipulate the browser rather than depending on an intermediary translation layer. Below, we’ll go through a few of these crucial attributes.

Setting up Playwright

 
These are a few simple steps for setting the playwright’s environment- 

1. Prerequisites: Make sure you have Java JDK (Java Development Kit) installed on your system. You can download it from the Oracle website or adopt OpenJDK.

2. Ensure you have a compatible Java IDE installed, such as IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse.

3. Create a Maven Project: Open your preferred Java IDE and create a new Maven project. If you’re using IntelliJ IDEA, you can choose the “Maven” project type and provide a GroupId, ArtifactId, and Project Name.

4. Add Playwright Java Dependency: Open your project’s pom.xml file and add the Playwright Java dependency.

<dependencies>
<!-- Other dependencies -->
<dependency>
<groupId>com.microsoft.playwright</groupId>
<artifactId>playwright</artifactId>
<version>1.13.0</version> <!-- Replace with the latest version -->
</dependency>
</dependencies>

5. Playwright doesn’t really rely on Node.js to manage browser installations and provide a communication bridge between the Java code and the underlying browser automation functionality.
   Playwright provides official bindings for various programming languages such as JavaScript/Node.js, Java, Python, and C#. When working with Playwright in a Java environment, there is no need to install Node.js and npm. Instead, you can utilize the Java bindings to seamlessly set up Playwright, manage browser drivers, and control browser instances within your Java-based projects.
6. To execute the Playwright tests, you can run the Java test classes using your IDE’s test runner or using build tools like Maven.

Parallel Execution of cross-browser Testing in Playwright

Using Java Playwright to run cross-browser testing concurrently can greatly speed up your testing procedure. Utilizing test frameworks that enable parallel test execution, such as JUnit or TestNG, will enable parallel execution. Here is a TestNG example

First, ensure that you have added TestNG to your project’s dependencies. You can add it to your Maven pom.xml file as follows:

<dependencies>
    <!-- Other dependencies -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.testng</groupId>
        <artifactId>testng</artifactId>
        <version>7.4.0</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Assume TestNg plugin has been already installed

In order to test various browsers, make distinct test classes for each one. There should be distinct @Test methods for each test class. Let’s make two test classes for Chrome and Firefox as an illustration:

import com.microsoft.playwright.*;
import org.testng.annotations.*;

public class ChromeTest {
    private Playwright playwright;
    private Browser browser;

    @BeforeClass
    public void setUp() {
        playwright = Playwright.create();
        browser = playwright.chromium().launch();
    }
    @AfterClass
    public void tearDown() {
        browser.close();
        playwright.close();
    }
    @Test
    public void testChrome() {
        BrowserContext context = browser.newContext();
        Page page = context.newPage();
        // Test steps for Chrome
    }
}

import com.microsoft.playwright.*;
import org.testng.annotations.*;

public class FirefoxTest {
    private Playwright playwright;
    private Browser browser;

    @BeforeClass
    public void setUp() {
        playwright = Playwright.create();
        browser = playwright.firefox().launch();
    }
    @AfterClass
    public void tearDown() {
        browser.close();
        playwright.close();
    }
    @Test
    public void testFirefox() {
        BrowserContext context = browser.newContext();
        Page page = context.newPage();
        // Test steps for Firefox
    }
}

Create a TestNG XML file, such as testng.xml, to configure the parallel execution of your test classes. Set the parallel attribute to “tests” and the thread counts to the desired number of parallel threads after specifying the test classes. Here’s an example:

<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "https://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd">
<suite name="Cross-Browser Testing Suite" parallel="tests" thread-count="2">
    <test name="Chrome Test">
        <classes>
            <class name="com.example.ChromeTest"/>
        </classes>
    </test>
    <test name="Firefox Test">
        <classes>
            <class name="com.example.FirefoxTest"/>
        </classes>
    </test>
</suite>

Conclusion

Cross-browser testing is essential for any web application to provide a consistent user experience across various browsers. In this tutorial, we looked at how to set up Playwright in Java for cross-browser testing.

Starting a new project, adding Playwright as a project dependency was the first stage. The next step was selecting the web browsers for our testing group and setting up a test script in Playwright for Java.

We used TestNG, a well-known testing framework that supports parallel execution, to streamline our testing procedure. Cross-browser testing was made quicker and more effective by developing distinct test classes for various browsers and setting up TestNG for concurrent execution.

Reference links

https://blog.nashtechglobal.com/playwright-an-introduction/
/https://www.browserstack.com/guide/playwright-tutorial/
https://playwright.dev/python/docs/writing-tests