Nearly a decade back I wrote a lot of browser CI tests with headless chrome as well as browser stack. I loved the idea, but they just didn’t handle things being a bit outside of perfect IRL, like taking a moment longer to load etc. They ended up having a lot of waits in them, taking a long time to write and were prone to being flakey. The tests basically lacked “common sense” and it made me think that one day someone would figure out how to make them work better.
I’m wondering if there are new frameworks, workflows, startups that have made this stuff easier and better. I’m not really in tech anymore but I wouldn’t mind writing some tests if the experience was better.
The synchronization problem (flakiness and all the waits) is tricky to get right. Browsers are concurrent systems, and programming around one is specialized enough that many devs don’t do it well, e.g. IMO if you’re adding ad-hoc waits or nesting timeouts, you’ve already lost.