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Selenium vs Playwright in 2026: Time to Scrap the Old Dog?

Selenium's been the scraping king forever, but Playwright's lapping it in 2026. Faster code, auto-waits, async magic — yet legacy codebases won't budge.

Selenium vs Playwright speed benchmark chart for web scraping in 2026

⚡ Key Takeaways

  • Playwright is 2-3x faster with auto-waits and native async for modern scraping. 𝕏
  • Stick with Selenium only for legacy code or rare browser needs. 𝕏
  • By 2026, expect Playwright to dominate new projects like jQuery's fall. 𝕏
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Originally reported by dev.to

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