Browser automation
The practice of controlling a web browser with software instead of a human, used for testing, data collection, and repetitive web tasks.
Browser automation means a program performs browser actions: navigating, clicking, typing, reading content, and asserting on results. The classic tools are Selenium, Puppeteer, and Playwright, which expose programmatic APIs over WebDriver or the Chrome DevTools Protocol. A newer generation adds record-and-replay, where a human performs a task once and the recording becomes a repeatable workflow, and AI agents, where a model decides the next action by reading the page.
Automation earns its keep on anything repetitive or large-scale: regression test suites that run on every release, QA passes across browsers and locales, collection of publicly available data, uptime and content monitoring, ad verification across regions, and routine operational tasks for the accounts a team legitimately manages. The recurring engineering challenge is brittleness. Scripts pinned to exact CSS paths or pixel positions break when pages change, so robust automation identifies elements by what they mean, such as role and visible text.
Oculr builds automation in at several levels. Record a workflow once and replay it whenever you need it, with elements re-found by role and text on every run rather than brittle pixel positions, and credentials handled as variables so secrets are not baked into recorded steps. One workflow can replay across the whole fleet with per-profile variables, workflows can be edited on a node canvas or as a step list, and existing Selenium, Puppeteer, and Playwright scripts attach unchanged.
