Playwright
An open-source browser automation framework from Microsoft that controls Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit — widely used for testing and JavaScript-heavy web scraping.
Full Definition
Playwright is a browser automation library developed by Microsoft that provides a single API for driving Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers. It supports async programming, automatic waiting (no manual sleeps needed), network interception, file downloads, mobile emulation, and multiple browser contexts (isolated sessions). For scraping, Playwright's network interception API is particularly powerful: it lets you mock or block requests, capture API responses, and inject scripts. Playwright Stealth (community patch) can suppress headless-browser detection signals. It is generally faster and more reliable than Selenium for modern single-page applications.
