Playwright is an open-source browser automation library developed by Microsoft that provides a unified async API for controlling Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. It supports page navigation, form interaction, element clicking, screenshot capture, network interception, and JavaScript injection across all three engine families.

Playwright was designed as the successor to Puppeteer, adding multi-browser support, improved async design, built-in waiting and retry logic, network interception capabilities, and first-class support for mobile device emulation. It handles the complexity of waiting for elements, network requests, and navigation events — actions that require careful timing in asynchronous browser automation.

For web scraping, Playwright's key advantages include: reliable element selectors with built-in auto-waiting, network request interception to capture API responses directly (often cleaner than HTML parsing), and mobile emulation for scraping mobile-optimised sites. AlterLab uses Playwright in Tier 4 and Tier 5 with stealth patches applied to normalise the headless browser fingerprint.

Examples

# Playwright equivalent — AlterLab handles this for you
const { chromium } = require('playwright');
const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: true });
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
const data = await page.$eval('.price', el => el.textContent);

Examples

Related Terms