Selenium

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2009–2024), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with Selenium, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Can't tell what type a function returns, so must debug or print types2024-08-13
Browser rendering APIs are unintuitive and sometimes flat out broken2021-10-11
Recorder extensions break often and are infuriating to use when they work2020-12-03
Doing a single action on dynamic pages needs waits and retries and is often frustrating2020-02-13
Tests are hard to write and debug, with waits and timing causing flaky failures2020-02-12
Resolution stuck at 1024x768 on a headless machine, costing a day of frustration2018-07-10
Hard to figure out how to inject JavaScript and wait for events2018-06-25
Recorded test refused to fill in the login box, so the user gave up2017-04-18
Tests break often because selectors are hard to get right and page changes break them2017-02-05
Hard to modify recorded scripts to randomize logins, form data and incremental searches2009-03-24