JavaScript Rendering: Puppeteer vs Playwright vs Selenium in 2026

JavaScript Rendering: Puppeteer vs Playwright vs Selenium in 2026 More than 70% of modern websites rely on JavaScript to render content. If your scraper only fetches raw HTML, you are missing most of the data. This guide compares the three major browser automation tools for web scraping in 2026. The Problem: JavaScript-Rendered Content import httpx # This returns an empty shell - data loads via JavaScript response = httpx . get ( " https://spa-website.com/products " ) print ( len ( response . text )) # 2KB of loader HTML # The actual content requires JS execution to appear You need a real browser engine to execute JavaScript and render the page. Playwright: The 2026 Default Choice Playwright has become the de facto standard for browser automation in Python. It supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API. from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright import json def scrape_spa ( url : str ) -> list [ dict ]: with sync_playwright () as p : browser = p . chromium . launch (