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4.6Key Takeaways
- Selenium pioneered browser automation with the WebDriver protocol (HTTP+JSON round-trips)
- Playwright uses persistent WebSocket connections, eliminating per-command overhead
- WebDriver BiDi brings the same bidirectional model to the Selenium ecosystem — shipping today (low-level in Selenium 4.x, default in WebdriverIO v9), with Selenium still on 4.x as of July 2026
- Playwright's auto-waiting removes the biggest source of Selenium test flakiness
- The industry is migrating toward Playwright for new projects; Selenium remains in legacy codebases
- Understanding both architectures makes you a more effective QA engineer