Thanks @triangleman, the multi-human languages feature has just been added in the latest release. There'll probably be edge cases which I couldn't encounter during testing. The tool is essentially like a macros library to minimize writing code and make automation of UI interactions easier. Appreciate feedback from the community!

Hi! I'm Ken from Singapore. TAGUI FEATURES • automate Chrome, Firefox, PhantomJS • visual automation of websites and desktop • write in 20+ human languages & JavaScript • Chrome extension for recording web actions • unzip and run on macOS, Linux, Windows • run by schedule, command line, API URL • advanced API / command calls to services

I left banking to do these open-source automation stuff full-time a year ago, partly out of interest and partly to dedicate time for self-directed learning. Tomorrow, I'll be moving back to full-time job at AI Singapore (https://www.aisingapore.org). It's a government initiative to build up AI capabilities locally. During my role there, integrating the tool (in its current form or a new form) with AI and ML capabilities will be part of my job scope.

Thanks Ben, it's been a while since we last spoke :) Yeah it's probably ok, I've extended the language parsing engine so that users can write automation scripts in their 21 different native languages. The language definitions can be easily improved or added by users.

Here's the current set - Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese.

Good to see the project making progress and that you're still chugging away.

My background is in test automation (on user interfaces). Is it correct to say in ML the concept of test automation is irrelevant? Because during training and predicting the model is already being validated for accuracy and correctness.

Hi HN folks, I'm from Singapore and starting a company specialising in web automation.

Web automation basically reproduces manual interactions you have with websites so that the computer can do it repeatedly for you. Common use cases are automating manual workflows to improve business productivity, gathering data for business intelligence, and web testing for agile development.

Rates are competitive at $18, €15, S$24 for a simple automation project. The automation can be quickly developed off-site or live on a call / video. More details in the link. Competitors are welcome to post here to share their services or tips, and help bring the web automation domain forward.

My goal is to offer another option to the RPA (robotic process automation) industry practice which takes a top-down approach. Too much bloat in the production and delivery process which gets passed on as high costs to customers (and arguably over-promised expectations). That makes it only possible for very large companies to enjoy benefits of RPA.

Hi bluepnume, if you are ok, can you share how you manage iframes and popups? I'm using DevTools protocol through websocket directly to communicate with Chrome. Have to do a lot of context handling (frames) and using Target.sendMessageToTarget (popup windows) to deal with them. These 2 features seem to be the harder to handle parts of the interaction layer when doing automation with DevTools Protocol. Thanks in advance!

Thanks ghetzel for sharing, nice work! I saw that you've made your own scripting language to make it user-friendly :)

Just went through your Friendscript syntax, the amount of work going into defining that language is impressive....

There was still some commits in early July but haven't seen new updates till date. Maintaining a browser project is mammoth task. Even for an established startup such as Segment you see that NightmareJS has lots of issues unreplied for months. I guess it's primarily because of a potentially large user base and all kinds of edge cases requirements from different users. And add on to that, suppose to work on all OSes. Nightmare.

I didn't follow that development. Can you share why Selenium maintainers chose not to implement headers? Is it that they want to restrict the tool to simulate what a normal user can do with a browser and not hacks such as overriding headers? Thanks in advance!

"Something something something normal users can't do that something something".

Basically, they're still stuck in this idea that they're ONLY for emulating user-available input (and the dev-tools don't exist).

In reality, there is tremendous interest in more complex programmatic interfaces, but apparently they're unwilling to see that, and are instead only interested in their implementations "user-only" ideological purity.

Thanks Jason, enjoyed your thought-provoking post. I'm reminded of Parkinson's law that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". It's as if the software bloats up to fill up the available hardware capacity.

From a fundamental level though, my hunch would be how modern development takes modularization / abstraction to a type of extreme. Imagine a popular Node.js module and how many dependencies it has and how many dependencies its dependencies have.

It's not hard to imagine a lot more computing power is required to handle this. But that's ok to decision makers, computing power is cheap. Saving developers time by using modularized developments brings more cost/profit benefits, like what Dan said.

PS: the link on Visual Studio. Oh wow, what fond nostalgic memories it brings me :)