We used Cypress for a while at Notion but removed it due to high memory usage and crashes. Instead we use a very boring stack of mocha + selenium-webdriver + Chrome on Linux. That’s not my favorite either, because we have to paper over all of the crufty Webdriver/Selenium abstractions that feel like they were designed for Java.
I would much prefer to use Puppeteer or Playwright now that they’re starting to stabilize - for a while they both either didn’t support Firefox, or required custom builds of browsers.
Wow!! I pay for both Notion (it's good, thanks!) and Cypress, and have literally described Cypress this way: "Cypress is to Selenium as Notion is to Confluence"... :-O
So, I am very surprised (but interested) to hear your tale. It is literally the first time I have ever heard of somebody going back (I assume it is back?) to Selenium from Cypress.
When we used Selenium (until mid-2018) our tests were hard to write and hard to parallelize, so they took like an hour on a beefy machine. Now they take 5 minutes (across 16 medium-ish VMs, admittedly, but parallelized "for money, not for free" by the Cypress dash board service.
I'm curious to hear more about your experience moving off Cypress — did your test suites take longer to run? (Or did you perhaps move off of it before they introduced auto-parallelization?)
I would much prefer to use Puppeteer or Playwright now that they’re starting to stabilize - for a while they both either didn’t support Firefox, or required custom builds of browsers.