E2E Testing in the Browser Cheat Sheet
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This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official documentation before being relied on in production. The reference material consulted while preparing these pages is listed in the section bibliography. |
A single-page, colour-coded summary of the end-to-end browser testing essentials — the architectures at a glance and a tool chooser, a side-by-side command table for Playwright, Cypress and Selenium (install, run headed and headless, pick a browser, locate, click and fill, wait and assert, mock the network, log in once, screenshots, video and traces, debugging, parallelism and retries), cross-browser setups, visual testing options and a determinism checklist, CI snippets and Docker images, AI agent commands and a script-less prompt template, a security checklist for browser agents, and a strip of what changed recently — handy for quick memorization or as a printable desk reference through the downloadable PDF. It reflects the baseline of the section as checked on 25 October 2026: Playwright 1.64, Cypress 16.2, Selenium 4.51, WebDriver BiDi Working Draft of 8 October 2026, the MCP specification 2026-07-28 and Chrome DevTools MCP 1.12. The section home page is E2E Testing in the Browser.
For the full explanation, every option, and additional examples, see the dedicated pages:
Foundations — How Browser Automation Works, Choosing a Tool, Example Application & Test Layout, and Test Design & Page Objects.
Playwright — Getting Started, Locators, Actions & Auto-Waiting, Assertions, Configuration, Fixtures & Projects, Authentication & Isolation, Network Mocking, Clock & API Testing, Debugging, Tracing & Codegen, Parallelism, Sharding & Retries, Component Testing, Python, Java & .NET, and Advanced Topics.
Cypress — Getting Started, Core Concepts, Queries, Assertions & Custom Commands, Network, Stubs, Spies & Clocks, Sessions, Authentication & Cross-Origin, Debugging, Studio, Plugins & Reporters, Component Testing, and Cypress Cloud.
Selenium — Getting Started, Drivers, Browsers & Options, Locating & Interacting, Waits & Expected Conditions, WebDriver BiDi, Selenium Grid, and Selenium IDE & Legacy.
Cross-cutting concepts — Cross-Browser Testing, Screenshots, Videos & Traces, Visual Regression Testing, Accessibility Checks in E2E Tests, Running in CI/CD, and Flaky Tests & Reliability.
AI agents in the browser — How AI Agents Drive Browsers, Playwright MCP & CLI, Chrome DevTools for Agents, AI Features in Cypress & Selenium, Playwright Test Agents, Agents That Control the Browser, Script-less Testing with AI Agents, and Securing Browser Agents.
Closing — What’s Changed and Upgrading.