Playwright Release Notes

📣 Playwright CLI+SKILLs 📣

We are adding a new token-efficient CLI mode of operation to Playwright with the skills located at playwright-cli. This brings the long-awaited official SKILL-focused CLI mode to our story and makes it more coding agent-friendly.
It is the first snapshot with the essential command set (which is already larger than the original MCP!), but we expect it to grow rapidly. Unlike the token use, that one we expect to go down since snapshots are no longer forced into the LLM!

Timeline

If you're using merged reports, the HTML report Speedboard tab now shows the Timeline:

UI Mode and Trace Viewer Improvements

• New 'system' theme option follows your OS dark/light mode preference
• Search functionality (Cmd/Ctrl+F) is now available in code editors
• Network details panel has been reorganized for better usability
• JSON responses are now automatically formatted for readability

Thanks to @cpAdm for contributing these improvements!

Miscellaneous

browserType.connectOverCDP() now accepts an isLocal option. When set to true, it tells Playwright that it runs on the same host as the CDP server, enabling file system optimizations.

Breaking Changes ⚠️

• Removed _react and _vue selectors. See locators guide for alternatives.
• Removed :light selector engine suffix. Use standard CSS selectors instead.
• Option devtools from browserType.launch() has been removed. Use args: ['--auto-open-devtools-for-tabs'] instead.
• Removed macOS 13 support for WebKit. We recommend to upgrade your macOS version, or keep using an older Playwright version.

Browser Versions

• Chromium 145.0.7632.6
• Mozilla Firefox 146.0.1
• WebKit 26.0

This version was also tested against the following stable channels:

• Google Chrome 144
• Microsoft Edge 144

Speedboard

In HTML reporter, there's a new tab we call "Speedboard":
It shows you all your executed tests sorted by slowness,
and can help you understand where your test suite is taking longer than expected.
Take a look at yours - maybe you'll find some tests that are spending a longer time waiting than they should!

Chrome for Testing

Starting with this release, Playwright switches from Chromium, to using Chrome for Testing builds. Both headed and headless browsers are subject to this. Your tests should still be passing after upgrading to Playwright 1.57.
We're expecting no functional changes to come from this switch. The biggest change is the new icon and title in your toolbar.
If you still see an unexpected behaviour change, please file an issue.

On Arm64 Linux

Playwright continues to use Chromium.

Waiting for webserver output

testConfig.webServer added a wait field. Pass a regular expression, and Playwright will wait until the webserver logs match it.

import { defineConfig } from '@playwright/test';
export default defineConfig({
  webServer: {
    command: 'npm run start',
    wait: {
      stdout: '/Listening on port (?<my_server_port>\\d+)/'
    },
  },
});

If you include a named capture group into the expression, then Playwright will provide the capture group contents via environment variables:

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';
test.use({ baseUrl: `http://localhost:${process.env.MY_SERVER_PORT ?? 3000}` });
test('homepage', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('/');
});

This is not just useful for capturing varying ports of dev servers. You can also use it to wait for readiness of a service that doesn't expose an HTTP readiness check, but instead prints a readiness message to stdout or stderr.

Breaking Change

After 3 years of being deprecated, we removed Page#accessibility from our API. Please use other libraries such as Axe if you need to test page accessibility. See our Node.js guide for integration with Axe.

New APIs

New property testConfig.tag adds a tag to all tests in this run. This is useful when using merge-reports.
worker.on('console') event is emitted when JavaScript within the worker calls one of console API methods, e.g. console.log or console.dir. worker.waitForEvent() can be used to wait for it.
locator.description() returns locator description previously set with locator.describe(), and Locator.toString() now uses the description when available.
New option steps in locator.click() and locator.dragTo() that configures the number of mousemove events emitted while moving the mouse pointer to the target element.
Network requests issued by Service Workers are now reported and can be routed through the BrowserContext, only in Chromium. You can opt out using the PLAYWRIGHT_DISABLE_SERVICE_WORKER_NETWORK environment variable.
Console messages from Service Workers are dispatched through worker.on('console'). You can opt out of this using the PLAYWRIGHT_DISABLE_SERVICE_WORKER_CONSOLE environment variable.

Browser Versions

• Chromium 143.0.7499.4
• Mozilla Firefox 144.0.2
• WebKit 26.0

Playwright Agents

Introducing Playwright Agents, three custom agent definitions designed to guide LLMs through the core process of building a Playwright test:
🎭 planner explores the app and produces a Markdown test plan
🎭 generator transforms the Markdown plan into the Playwright Test files
🎭 healer executes the test suite and automatically repairs failing tests

Run npx playwright init-agents with your client of choice to generate the latest agent definitions:

• Generate agent files for each agentic loop
  • Visual Studio Code

    npx playwright init-agents --loop=vscode
    

  • Claude Code

    npx playwright init-agents --loop=claude
    

  • opencode

    npx playwright init-agents --loop=opencode
    

  Note
  VS Code v1.105 (currently on the VS Code Insiders channel) is needed for the agentic experience in VS Code. It will become stable shortly, we are a bit ahead of times with this functionality!

Learn more about Playwright Agents

New APIs

New methods page.consoleMessages() and page.pageErrors() for retrieving the most recent console messages from the page
New method page.requests() for retrieving the most recent network requests from the page
Added --test-list and --test-list-invert to allow manual specification of specific tests from a file

UI Mode and HTML Reporter

Added option to 'html' reporter to disable the "Copy prompt" button
Added option to 'html' reporter and UI Mode to merge files, collapsing test and describe blocks into a single unified list
Added option to UI Mode mirroring the --update-snapshots options
Added option to UI Mode to run only a single worker at a time

Breaking Changes

Event browserContext.on('backgroundpage') has been deprecated and will not be emitted. Method browserContext.backgroundPages() will return an empty list

Miscellaneous

Aria snapshots render and compare input placeholder
Added environment variable PLAYWRIGHT_TEST to Playwright worker processes to allow discriminating on testing status

Browser Versions

Chromium 141.0.7390.37
Mozilla Firefox 142.0.1
WebKit 26.0

Highlights

• #37479 - [Bug]: Upgrade Chromium to 140.0.7339.186.
• #37147 - [Regression]: Internal error: step id not found.
• #37146 - [Regression]: HTML reporter displays a broken chip link when there are no projects.
• #37137 - Revert "fix(a11y): track inert elements as hidden".
• #37532 - chore: do not use -k option

Browser Versions

• Chromium 140.0.7339.186
• Mozilla Firefox 141.0
• WebKit 26.0

This version was also tested against the following stable channels:

• Google Chrome 139
• Microsoft Edge 139

New APIs

New Property testStepInfo.titlePath Returns the full title path starting from the test file, including test and step titles.

Codegen

Automatic toBeVisible() assertions: Codegen can now generate automatic toBeVisible() assertions for common UI interactions. This feature can be enabled in the Codegen settings UI.

Breaking Changes

⚠️ Dropped support for Chromium extension manifest v2.

Miscellaneous

Added support for Debian 13 "Trixie".

Browser Versions

Chromium 140.0.7339.16

Mozilla Firefox 141.0

WebKit 26.0

This version was also tested against the following stable channels:

Google Chrome 139

Microsoft Edge 139