Browser Automation with Python: The Starter Guide to Selenium and Playwright
Python browser automation with Selenium and Playwright. Learn how to fill forms, log in, scrape protected data, and automate website tasks with real examples.
Browser automation is just a skill that immediately makes our lives easier when we understand the flow of things. If you write Python, it gives you a simple way to control a website the same way you would with your own hands.
You can click buttons, fill out forms, pull information from pages, and handle tasks that normally require you to sit there and do them yourself.
If you work with data, run anything online, or just want to cut down on busywork, learning automation can make a real difference.
At the beginning, you learn the basics which are what I want to touch on here today. You learn how to open a browser, how to click something, and how to type into a field. Once those pieces make sense, you can move around the web with ease.
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What follows is a simple walkthrough of how browser automation actually works. You will see how to fill forms, log into sites, scrape pages you normally need a password to access, and build automated routines that run on their own.
The goal in this quick read is to help you understand the process in a clear way and show you why this skill is so helpful once you start using it.
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What Browser Automation Really Is
When you browse the internet, you’re the one doing all the work. You click around, type into boxes, scroll through pages, and move from one screen to the next. Browser automation takes those same actions and lets your code do them for you.
We now have tools like Selenium and Playwright, where you can write instructions that act the same way a person would. Your script can open a site, type in a username and password, press the login button, wait for the page to load, and pull whatever.
The easiest way to think about these tools is to picture them as helpers that follow clear steps. You show them what to do once, and they can repeat those steps over and over without slipping up or slowing down.
This is especially helpful on sites that don’t have an API or hide their data behind a login screen. A lot of dashboards and internal company tools fall into this category.
Once you start using browser automation, you begin to see how many problems it solves that regular scraping can’t.
Libraries like Requests and BeautifulSoup are great for simple pages, but they don’t run JavaScript, they don’t stay logged in, and they can’t handle pages that change after they load. Browser automation fills in that gap by acting like a real user.
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The Tools: Selenium and Playwright
Selenium and Playwright are both used for the same kind of work, but they each have their own feel.
Selenium has been around for a long time and is well known in the testing world. It works with several programming languages and can control any major browser. Playwright is newer and was created by the same team that originally worked on Puppeteer.
It runs faster, handles modern websites more smoothly, and has built-in waiting so it can pause automatically until the page is ready. With Selenium, you often have to add those waits yourself.
Both are good choices, and Selenium is still used everywhere, but many developers find Playwright easier to work with on today’s sites.
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Filling Forms with Automation
Most browser automation starts with filling out forms. These can be login pages, search boxes, signup forms, or anything else that asks the user to type something in.
A way you can try to picture this is to think about checking into a hotel. You walk up to the front desk, show your ID, write down your information, and sign the form.
Automation works the same way. It finds the fields, types in the values you give it, and submits the form for you. Here is a basic Selenium example that fills out a login form.
The steps are easy to follow. Open the browser, go to the login page, type into the two fields, click the button, and close everything when you are done. Once you get comfortable with this pattern, automation starts to feel very natural.
Playwright follows the same idea but with cleaner code.
Both tools let you complete forms the same way a person would. They click, type, submit, and move on to the next step.
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Scraping Protected Content
A lot of the valuable information on the internet sits behind a login page. Online stores, dashboards, portals, Saas tools, etc. These sites all require you to sign in before you can see anything.
Many of these pages load their data with JavaScript, which means tools like Requests or BeautifulSoup cannot reach the content you need.
This is where browser automation becomes really useful. Once you log in using Selenium or Playwright, your script has the same access a regular user would have.
The browser keeps track of your cookies and session automatically, so you can move through protected pages and pull whatever information you need.
With automation, you can log in once through your script, collect the data, save it to a CSV or database, and even build reports from it without touching the site yourself.
Here is a setup of scraping protected data after logging in and how it might look.
Being able to do this opens up many opportunities that would not be possible with normal scraping tools.
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Understanding Elements and Selectors
A huge part of browser automation is learning how to target the right elements on a page. Every button, text box, link, and label is an HTML element, and your script has to know exactly which one to interact with. If it cannot find the element, the rest of the automation will fall apart.
Websites give you a few different ways to identify elements. Some have IDs, some use class names, and others require CSS or XPath selectors. IDs are usually the easiest since they tend to be unique.
When a site does not give you something that simple, you start combining selectors, searching by text, or using the element’s position on the page.
To get comfortable with this, you need to spend time in Chrome DevTools. You can inspect any element, highlight it on the page, and see how it is built. Once you start recognizing patterns in HTML structure, working with automation becomes much easier because you always know what your script is targeting.
Waiting for Elements to Load
Most websites nowadays don’t load everything when we open the page. Parts of the site appear only after the browser finishes running JavaScript or after data comes back from an API.
A button might show up a few seconds later, or a table might fill in after the page has already loaded. If your script tries to click or read something before it exists, it will fail.
Selenium gives you a few different ways to wait, such as explicit waits, implicit waits, or simple sleep timers. Playwright takes care of this for you by waiting automatically until the element is ready.
Good automation is patient. It lets the page finish loading what it needs, and then it moves on to the next step. That patience is what makes your scripts reliable.
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Wrapping it up
Browser automation is one of those skills that quietly makes a huge difference once you learn it. It takes you from writing simple scripts to building systems that run on their own. It gives you access to information hidden behind logins, cuts out repetitive work, and lets you control the web through code.
Selenium and Playwright give you the tools, but the real skill comes from understanding how websites behave. You learn how to move through pages, pick out the right elements, wait for things to load, and pull the data you need. Once you put those pieces together, you can automate almost anything you do online.
Learning browser automation doesn’t just improve your programming. It changes how you organize your work and how you think about your time. It gives you the freedom to hand off tasks you used to do by hand and focus on the things that matter more.
If you keep building on these skills, you will see that browser automation is not just a technical trick. It becomes a practical tool you rely on every day.
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