What is Playwright and what problem does it solve?

Playwright exists because browser tests were historically slow to write, easy to flake and hard to debug. It gives you one API for three browser engines, waits for the page to be ready before acting, and records what happened so a failure can be inspected after the fact.

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test";

test("signs in and lands on the dashboard", async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto("/login");
  await page.getByLabel("Email").fill("asha@example.com");
  await page.getByLabel("Password").fill("correct-horse");
  await page.getByRole("button", { name: "Sign in" }).click();

  await expect(page.getByRole("heading", { name: "Dashboard" })).toBeVisible();
});

What the framework provides

• Drivers for Chromium, Firefox and WebKit from one test API
• Automatic actionability checks instead of explicit waits
• An isolated browser context for every test by default
• A built-in runner, assertions, fixtures and parallelism
• Tracing, screenshots and video for post-mortem debugging
• An API request client that shares configuration with UI tests

Playwright talks to its own patched browser builds rather than driving browsers through the Selenium WebDriver protocol. That lets it control network traffic, emulate devices and observe the page more directly. The same library can be used as a plain automation tool outside the test runner.