Playwright is a library for browser automation developed by Microsoft since 2020. In 2026 it is the de facto standard — captured most of the market from Puppeteer thanks to cross-browser support (Chromium + Firefox + WebKit) and a better API.
Key features:
- Auto-wait — commands automatically wait for elements before clicking. Eliminates 90% of flaky tests.
- Network interception — full control over requests (mocking, modification, blocking).
- Multi-browser, multi-language — Node.js, Python, .NET, Java with the same API.
- Browser context — incognito equivalent, isolated sessions, fingerprint per context.
- Trace viewer — debugger showing step-by-step what happened, with screenshots and network traffic.
Use cases: production scraping, E2E testing, monitoring, RPA. Not a load testing tool nor for simple HTTP fetching.
Vs Puppeteer: bigger community, more updates, cross-browser. Vs Selenium: more modern API, faster, better debugging.