Why did Google develop Puppeteer if Protractor was already there?

Question

Does anybody know why Google decided to develop Puppeteer when there was Protractor already? (specially for Angular)

Answer 1

There are a few fundamental differences between Puppeteer and Protractor

• Protractor is an external web application testing tool while Puppeteer is node module of the Chromium engine.
• Chromium being a browser, Puppeteer is pretty faster compared to Protractor.
• Protractor can be used to automate the different browsers like google-chrome, firefox, internet-explorer, microsoft-edge, opera, brave, etc. But using Puppeteer you'd be able to automate the chromium engine only. As of today only Chrome and Microsoft Edge browser are using the Chromium engine.
• Puppeteer can test APIs using request/responses but with Protractor it is a bit complicated.
• You can check the amount of time taken to load the page with Puppeteer but Protractor does not have feature for it.
• Puppeteer can be used to check how much of CSS/JS files are used for loading a page which won't be possible using Protractor.
• You can test the application without loading the images in Puppeteer but that isn't possible through Protractor.
• You can use all the google-chrome-devtools of chrome in Puppeteer but Protractor does not support it.
• You can execute the test in different devices using the emulators in the puppeteer but emulating a device in Protractor is complicated.
• You can save the screenshots in image and pdf format in puppeteer where as Protractor provide a feature to save a screenshot in image format only.