Stop Using Selenium or Playwright for Web Scraping

[@andydataguy]

Your timing could not have been more perfect on this video brother. Thank you!! 🙌🏾💜 Idk if you have a community or program, but as soon as i get hired im buying it to help support you. As a selftaught dev (formerly digital marketer) your videos were vital in being able to finally wrap my head around data extraction

[@hydrosis-v3k]

holy shit, literally the first proper guide to a decent alternative to web automation.

[@SigKappel]

Thanks John for this update. I have some mission critical scrapes for inventory and this will come in handy when I need to be more stealth.

[@zvnman]

Thanks for the kind advice! In gratitude to all my clients, I give your referral link)) Keep going bro!!!

[@EnglishRain]

Thank you i didn't know Playwright isn't really recommended for scraping

[@frankcasanova2132]

JUST WHAT I NEEDED WHEN I NEEDED IT

[@realitywords-17398]

Great Man.......... You are struggling a lot...... Keep your morale high!

[@gamehubler]

I learn a lot from your video explanations and like your style of sharing it with us, and comes with the fresh air because it is up to date. Can you maybe bring some more complex web scraping examples? Mostly the pages in your showcase were viewable directly or with a login. Would it be possible to bring some examples in the future with GQL sites, it is more difficult to solve these types.

[@mvace]

Thanks John, I was struggling to login to one website for a few days now. It was detecting my automation script. I used selenium-driverless and it works great now. So perfect timing with this video! Do you have any tips on how to handle uploads with selenium-driverless? After I log in to the website I need to upload a file from my local machine but the upload seems to be working differently for selenium-driverless compared to selenium. There is not much in the documentation regarding uploads in selenium-driverless.

[@kinuthiamatata6040]

working with a website that uses WebSocket connections instead of traditional XHR/fetch requests. What's the best way to intercept traffic for scraping?

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

honestly I haven't got a lot of experience with websockets, but i know you can connect to them via requests/httpx but i dont have any practical exp sorry

[@munchcup]

Search on KZbin scraping Ohio state student emails but It's in js which same works for python.

[@mehdikaraouet7980]

​@JohnWatsonRooney all the respect for honesty and humbleness ❤

[@eyayawb]

Reverse engineer the data transfer process. I successfully reverse-engineered an app that pulls data from a Firebase database using a WebSocket connection. I used websockets package to replicate the communication pattern.

[@abdelkoddouslaarif1295]

okay! this is all good and well, impressive even, but I wanna ask a slightly different question, how do you stay updated with the new alternatives that come out? you always seem to know when something better is out or if something old isn't as reliable anymore or not being maintained... what tech news forums/ community chats do you follow?

[@EmanueleCannizzaro]

As usual a great content explained in plain English.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Many thanks!

[@utsavgoswami5263]

thank you so much for this. if it is okay, are there any better alternatives (i.e. cheaper) to proxyscrape?

[@dragon3602010]

so when choosing "nodriver" instead of "SeleniumBase" ? thanks

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Try both and see which works best for what you are trying to do

[@return_1101]

The best one! Thank you very much, mr. Rooney!

[@graczew]

Thanks, mate. This is really helpful.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

thanks mate appreciate it

[@Analyse_US]

This is gold! Thanks.

[@yafethtb]

At last, a web scraping library that does not need another Chromium and uses only my Chrome! I'm waiting for something like nodriver.

[@Optimusjf]

How can I send a PFX client certificate in Selenium-driverless?

[@nickwoodward819]

i'm a bit confused by "using the chrome already installed on your machine" - do you mean the server? or is this a python thing? (I'm using js and would be scraping either in a serverless function or in node)

[@kinuthiamatata6040]

i agree this might not be easily "automateable" , "You may consider Playwright's connectOverCDP() with a containerized Chrome. Just make sure to expose Chrome's debug port via socat (socat TCP-LISTEN:9222,fork TCP:localhost:9222) and connect to that. This works great with Node/serverless and gives you full browser auto-capabilities."

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Sorry to clarify - when you install selenium or playwright,m they install their own version of chrome. these two use the existing install on your pc already (if you have it) so you install chrome as you would normally, no extra install steps etc

[@cstanleyhns]

Hi, is it possible to run this kind of thing in docker and then ultimately in a lambda?

[@hamzahalli3500]

Thank you

[@rewazilol]

Do you have experience using Playwright and there being issues? On one hand I know its a test lib, but on the other hand its extremely well funded and well maintained. The nodriver lib looks like it was built by one guy. I'm still kind of not sure which way to go

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Playwright it an amazing library, it’s easy to use and works extremely well. But for web scraping you have to monkey around with it as even the most basic WAF can detect it and throw a captcha. Nodriver is build by one guy but it’s open source and removes a lot of the obvious flags that the browser is being controller automatically which is why I’m talking about it here

[@wisjnujudho3152]

wow. i think i need to modify all of my scrapers.

[@saadkhan883]

Sir I am using playwright library to scrap Google maps so please tell is it a good choice to scrap data from GMpaps , because I am still thinking about blocking or recaptcha ...

[@hw5622]

great video! thx!!!!!!!!

[@amrogendiah198]

Could you make a video about scraping using AI with python ?

[@green-forest-23]

There's something like this for typescript?

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Yes but I forget what it’s called - hopefully Someone else will know

[@boniazdaniel]

Puppeteer extra plugin? The stealth one

[@serkhetreo2489]

Hi, what if i want to build an unofficial api for a site . Is there a better way

[@phantazzor]

how to scrape an app if there are no web version

[@DavidChavez-z2v]

Como sabes estas cosas excelente

[@MohanadSaid-u8x]

Liiiiiit 🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@luisechevarria186]

Where does one begin for web-scraping? I am trying to scrape, JS heavy websites, all I see are recommendations to use Selenium/Playwright, this video is not too clear about what to use instead.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Try using selenium-driverless. Similar to selenium but less detectable causing you less issues scraping

[@Canda-fh4xc]

Thank you