Alternatives
Products that do what Helium - Simple web automation does
Hi everyone, I'm working for a startup called BugFree Software and would love to hear your feedback on a new product we are launching today. Helium is a library that wraps around Selenium to simplify web automation. It does away with many of the technicalities involved with web scripting. For example: Here is a Selenium script. Can you guess what it does? >>> ff = Firefox() ... >>> text_area = ff.find_element_by_id("u_0_1q") >>> text_area.send_keys("Hello World!") >>> button = ff.find_element_by_class_name("_42g-") >>> button.click() Here is the same script rewritten using Helium: >>>…
- 1HL
2020 · github.com
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9TO
Hey HN! I built Termitty because I was tired of the hacky solutions I kept writing for SSH automation. While building my workflow automation SaaS, I had this seemingly simple requirement: workflows needed to execute tasks on remote servers, not just in browsers. Selenium made the browser part elegant - you could wait for elements, handle dynamic content, maintain session state. But for SSH? I was stuck in the stone age. I ended up writing this monster of a custom driver that: - Maintained persistent SSH connections in a pool - Kept track of working directories between commands - Tried to…
2025 · github.com
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13IB
Hey everyone! Some time ago I was analyzing why React apps are so hard to optimize, and came to a conclusion that the lack of atomic updates is the culprit. I made an experimental library which basically updates everything in place directly in HTML. At some point I became aware that Solidjs exists, which is a very similar idea, but at the end of the day I realized my approach to API is quite different and warrants the existence of my library (my state primitive allows selector subscriptions, array iterators return a state primitive with the element, allowing to never re-render the whole…
2024 · github.com
- 14
- 15BA
Hi HN, I’d like to share an open-source project we’ve been working on for a while: Browser4. The motivation came from a recurring frustration: most browser automation tools (Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer) are excellent for human-written scripts, but start to show friction when used as a core execution layer for AI agents or at very high concurrency. So instead of building “another wrapper around Playwright”, we experimented with a different direction: designing a browser engine where AI agents are first-class citizens. ### What Browser4 is Browser4 is a browser automation engine built on…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 16PA
I just released Phoenix 2.0! I took over the project this summer and rewrote it from the ground up. :) Phoenix is a lightweight OS X window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as CoffeeScript. Phoenix aims for efficiency and a very small footprint. If you like the idea of scripting your own window or app management toolkit with JavaScript, Phoenix is probably going to give you the things you want. With Phoenix you can bind keyboard shortcuts and system events, and use these to interact with OS X. Take a look!…
2015
- 17CH
There is a growing number of companies offering anti-bot protection SaaS to protect websites from scraping by automated bots based on Puppeteer/Selenium. Most of them rely on browser properties such as headers, javascript properties (window., navigator.), behavior analysis, to build device/user fingerprints and match it against a database of "whitelisted" fingerprints (typical user behavior/settings/device props etc). For the past few months, together with two other devs I have worked on a customized Puppeteer/Playwright scraping backend. It's essentially a drop-in…
2021
- 18WI
Hello all, I've been working on research tools for Wasm for some time now, and just today we put up the pre-print for our newest paper "Flexible Non-intrusive Dynamic Instrumentation for WebAssembly" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07973), which will appear in ASPLOS 2024. Two previous papers, one about Wizard's interpreter (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563311) and one about the JIT (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13241) have been discussed on HN before. This new paper explains what Wizard is really about: dynamic instrumentation of…
2024 · github.com
- 19PB
Hi HN, We're Rishabh, Aashish, and Noah, the creators of ProtoType: a platform for building GraphQL backends. You can check it out here: https://www.useprototype.com We were fed up with creating the same sort of APIs over and over again when building web applications so we built this tool for ourselves. As we're all in university, we showed it around to our friends and they enjoyed using it to kickstart their projects. After that, we thought we'd host it on a website and allow anybody to use it! ProtoType is different from similar GraphQL backend builders such as 8base in that it…
2019
- 20HP
We're integrating with the awesome project Matter.js (http://brm.io/matter-js/) as a Physics engine for our HTML5 animation app. Here's a quick demo video showing it specifically in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHI-hNjiors In developing, I'd often spend hours playing with it making complex rube goldberg setups and pinball machines :).
2015 · tumult.com
- 21AA
Hey HN! I have been working on Ant for a while now, would love to share around now. What is Ant? It's my JavaScript runtime, built from scratch over many hours of work. Much effort has gone into keeping the binary size small, around 9MB at the moment (6.5 MB with -Os). On my M4 Pro, the hono coldstart bench (examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js) lands around 5ms, about 2.4x faster than bun, and 5.8x faster than node. To keep things small, the engine ("Ant Silver") is hand-written, not a wrapper around V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey. The JIT is still a work in progress but it…
May 2026 · github.com
- 22ET
Hi HN folks! I’m the creator of Exo and wanted to share my progress with the HN community. Exo is an electron app that uses a chat interface and open Ai to write code directly to your file system/repos. Exo is a work in progress - its very new and has many rough edges. I was hoping to get some early feedback from HN folks and hopefully some early users. Once you create an account the universal electron installer link is on the dashboard. Here is a quick explainer video: https://www.loom.com/share/5f34499ccfb54bfdae32ee50f454b365 Exo started as a thin wrapper around…
2023 · getexo.dev
- 23AP
2013 · github.com
- 24IM
Hello! I just made my first web app with Sinatra. It is a REST API that helps people add two-step verification to their websites or apps. I am a complete noob in web development so please criticize me and let me know how shitty this whole thing is. :) http://two-step.herokuapp.com/
2014
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →