I’m so excited to announce that, after eight months, Puppeteer-Sharp 3 is here!

Getting Puppeteer-Sharp 3 out was quite a challenge. The lack of sponsors on Puppeteer-Sharp and the strong support of Microsoft on Playwright-Sharp made me put all my efforts on Playwright-Sharp in the past few months.

But while a was writing the UI Testing with Puppeteer book, Puppeteer-Sharp got to 1 Million downloads (1 million downloads and only three sponsors), I said to myself: “Hey, let’s do something to celebrate!” So I decided to wrap up Experimental Firefox Support. And that took us to v3!

What’s new

PuppeteerSharp 3 is the first version that doesn’t fully map the same version (Puppeteer 3) upstream. It’s quite a Frankenstein, version-wise, but for good!
The first neat feature is that Puppeteer-Sharp is shipping Chromium 90.0.4403.0, which is the version that Puppeteer v8 is using.
The second new feature is EmulateNetworkConditionsAsync, which was also a feature introduced in Puppeteer v8. This method allows the use to emulate networks such as 3G or 4G.
And last, but not least: Experimental Firefox support.
You can find the complete changelog on the release page.

The state of the Fox

Using PuppeteerSharp with Firefox is as easy as passing Product.Firefox to both the BrowserFetcher constructor, and the LaunchAsync method:

await new BrowserFetcher(Product.Firefox).DownloadAsync();
using var browser = await Puppeteer.LaunchAsync(new LaunchOptions 
{ 
    Headless = false, 
    Product = Product.Firefox 
});
using var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();
await page.GoToAsync("https://www.google.com");
await page.ScreenshotAsync("./google.png");

But remember, this is still experimental. Only 340 tests of the 681 are running on Firefox. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.
I also had to turn off the tests on Windows because of many zombie processes that remained open. I found this also happens on the node version.

I want to thank Robin Richtsfeld who implemented the emulate network conditions feature, among many other things, and Simon Cropp who takes every project he touches to the next level.

What’s next

I created the V9 Project, so we can take PuppeteerSharp to what I guess will be the next Puppeteer version.

But it will be hard to accomplish it without help. I hope I can get more support from contributors on this next project.

If you are reading this post and making money with Puppeteer-Sharp, I encourage you to sponsor this project.

I hope we can catch Puppeteer soon and keep this project moving.

Don’t stop coding!