Protractor is not the first end-to-end testing tool that the Angular team built. The first tool was called Scenario Runner. In order to understand why Protractor was built, we need to first look at its predecessor--Scenario Runner.
Scenario Runner is in the maintenance mode and has reached the end of its life. It has been deprecated in the place of Protractor. In this section, we will look at what Scenario Runner was and what gaps the tool had.
Julie Ralph is the primary contributor of Protractor. According to Julie Ralph, the motivation for Protractor was based on the following experience with the Angular Scenario Runner on another project within Google (http://javascriptjabber.com/106-jsj-protractor-with-julie-ralph/):
"We tried using the Scenario Runner. And we found that it really just couldn't do the things that we needed to test. We needed to test things like logging in. Your login page isn't an Angular page, and the Scenario Runner couldn...