Testing and Webscraping

These are all Javascript frameworks for testing web apps. It would be possible to make a more comprehensive list, but given the nature of Javascript and it's vast ecosystem of NPM packages, a timeline for it sounds most suitable. For other languages like C, testing is done with debuggers like GDB.

Selenium 2004

Cypress 2015

history Cypress is the name of the company as well as the framework itself. It was created due to limitations of Selenium such as it's reliance of the Web Driver protocol. This protocol had developers write tests in a separate language such as Python or Java. Cypress instead integrates directly in the browser and is more compatible with modern SPA frameworks like Vue and React. Development first began in 2015, with the initial and stable release in 2017 and 2022 respectively.

Puppeteer 2017

Node.js library for Chrome/Chromium developed at Google.

Playwright 2020

Microsoft hired the same engineers who worked on Google's Puppeteer in order to create Playwright, which unlike Puppeteer, supports other browsers including Firefox and Safari.