Modern web applications increasingly adopt Single-Page Application (SPA) architectures to enhance the user experience through client-side rendering and dynamic content loading. However, these characteristics introduce significant challenges for automated end-to-end (E2E) testing, including asynchronous DOM manipulation, complex state management, and timing synchronization issues. This study presents a comprehensive empirical comparison of three prominent E2E testing frameworks—Selenium WebDriver, Cypress, and Playwright—across React and Vue-based SPAs. Using a quantitative experimental approach, 25 standardized test cases were executed 15 times each across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, for a total of 270 testing sessions. Performance evaluation focused on four key metrics: execution time, success rate, CPU usage, and memory consumption. Results demonstrate that Playwright achieved the fastest execution time (56.25 seconds on React-Chrome), while Selenium exhibited superior resource efficiency with the lowest memory consumption (196.59 MB on Vue-Chrome). The Distance to Ideal Alternative (DIA) multi-criteria decision analysis method identified Playwright-Chrome as optimal for React applications (DIA score: 0.886715) and Selenium-Chrome for Vue applications (DIA score: 0.908237), indicating that framework selection should be context-dependent based on application characteristics and deployment requirements. This research supports the conclusion that no universal "best" testing framework exists, underscoring the importance of evidence-based, application-specific tool selection in software quality assurance.
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