What you could do if you had a free, tireless browser operator?! Introducing Playwright.

Browsers are our primary platform for running applications and retrieving information. We have to use browsers to test applications, verify health and current performance of applications, look up data and download (as) files, submit information, and do much of our daily work.

Suppose we had a new colleague — who is extremely good at operating a browser and who does not mind repetitive task; this colleague does not ask for pay or sustenance, we only need to provide clear instructions on the tasks this colleague needs to perform through the browser. This colleague can also bring their friends with the exact same characteristics and capabilities and together they can get a lot of browser work done.

Note that these browser “robots” are very adept at browser interaction, much more so than regular human users — they can look in the HTML source, the DOM structure, HTTP requests and the JavaScript context as well as the local storage and cookies and they know how to manipulate all of these.

This article introduces Playwright — an open source software library that provides with a deus in machina — a robot in our browser do perform power operations. And this opens up many more opportunities than you may realize at first glance. At least more than I…