Browser automation is programmatic control of a browser — a full-featured Chrome, Firefox or Safari — to perform repetitive tasks. Unlike simple HTTP requesting (e.g. curl), browser automation renders JavaScript, executes scripts, handles cookies, sessions, and understands the full page DOM.
Main tools: Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium. All use CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) underneath.
Practical applications:
- Web scraping of JS-rendered sites (most modern ones)
- Monitoring page changes (prices, availability, content)
- Auto-filling forms and submission
- End-to-end testing in CI/CD
- Automated report retrieval from portals (banking, government, regulatory)
Browser automation is significantly more computationally expensive than HTTP scraping — runs a full browser with rendering — but is the only option for protected sites (Cloudflare, Akamai) or heavily JavaScript-dependent sites.