I noticed recently that running frontend Playwright tests on macOS via GitHub Actions is noticeably faster than on Ubuntu. This is because macOS ships with more browser dependencies out of the box, whereas the base Ubuntu image needs to install them all every run, which takes time. But Playwright has an image with these dependencies already installed! In the end it saves about 30 seconds on Ubuntu.
Node.js now has a built-in test runner, which I've now tried, and it's fantastic! However, it can't be used for frontend testing, or browser testing, obviously. While web-test-runner is the best (imo) test runner for frontend tests, having different runners requires you to learn different libraries and use different imports for each even when doing dead simple environment-agnostic unit tests. In this post I'll talk about how I've unified the experience, and the path that lead to being able to do that.
There are tons of options for test packages and frameworks within the JavaScript ecosystem, both on the backend and frontend. This is my knowledge dump of them.
Disclaimer: This is only what I know about each package from browsing its docs, my experiences with them, and my, often strong (beware), opinions. I can't possibly hear or know about all available testing packages.