Actually the release of Puppeteer is a really exciting development. I've been waiting for some time for something like this to happen. We've seen what happened to PhantomJS (almost 2k open issues and main maintainer stepping down without a successor), NightmareJS (lots of unreplied issues for months, probably the project is not a strategic part of Segment) and so on. In theory it is great for an individual or an established startup to drive a web browser automation project. But in reality, the scope of web browser automation simply gets out of hand very quickly. There are just too much edge cases to support for a fast-changing domain.

Being driven by a large commercial entity actually has a chance of making it work out. With the browser automation tool and the browser dev team being one team, there can be synergies not possible otherwise. When I spoke to CasperJS creator some time ago, I can understand why there will be burnout. Referring to the popular Chromeless project launched less than a month ago, there are already 150+ new issues and 100+ still open, and they already have enough pipelines for a few releases ahead. It can be a nightmare to manage.

There's just too many needs from a large user-base for such projects. I'm speaking from the context of test automation and general browser automation.

Yep. Pat Meenan's herculean / ultramarathon support of WebPageTest is a remarkable exception. (Speaking of WPT, after just a cursory glance at this thread on my phone prior to thumbing this comment, it surprisingly hasn't been mentioned yet? shrug)

I just recently got to know WebPageTest. It even has scripting abilities! I'm just surprised why the project didn't enter into mainstream (in the sense that an average test automation guy like me will know).