Chrome specifically, is just Chromium with some proprietary features added on.Īs Chromium lacks support for things like automatic updates and multimedia codecs, Chrome’s user experience is generally better. In this case, Playwright can be configured to download browsers via a proxy server.Chromium is a FOSS project that’s the base for various browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Opera.

Sometimes companies maintain an internal proxy that blocks direct access to the public resources. Install behind a firewall or a proxy īy default, Playwright downloads browsers from Microsoft's CDN. Instead you can test against the recent WebKit build. Playwright doesn't work with the branded version of Safari since it relies on patches. This gives a lot of lead time to react on the potential browser update issues. Playwright's WebKit version matches the recent WebKit trunk build, before it is used in Apple Safari and other WebKit-based browsers. Instead you can test against the recent Firefox Stable build. Playwright doesn't work with the branded version of Firefox since it relies on patches. Playwright's Firefox version matches the recent Firefox Stable build. So if you are part of the organization that uses such policies, it is easiest to use bundled Chromium for your local testing, you can still opt into stable channels on the bots that are typically free of such restrictions. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge respect enterprise policies, which include limitations to the capabilities, network proxy, mandatory extensions that stand in the way of testing. If your site relies on this kind of codecs (which is rarely the case), you will also want to use the official channel.

Chromium does not have all the codecs that Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge are bundling due to various licensing considerations and agreements. Media codecs Īnother reason for testing using official binaries is to test functionality related to media codecs. In this case, you can opt into one of the stable channels, 'chrome' or 'msedge'. Having said that, testing policies often require regression testing to be performed against the current publicly available browsers. You catch breakage early and have a lot of time to fix it before the official Chrome update. Since Playwright is ahead of Stable channels for the browsers, it gives peace of mind that the upcoming Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge releases won't break your site. Using the default Playwright configuration with the latest Chromium is a good idea most of the time. When to use Google Chrome & Microsoft Edge and when not to? Defaults Run with the -help option to see a full a list of browsers that can be installed. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge installations will be installed at the default global location of your operating system overriding your current browser installation. In particular, the current Playwright version will support Stable and Beta channels of these browsers.Īvailable channels are chrome, msedge, chrome-beta, msedge-beta or msedge-dev. While Playwright can download and use the recent Chromium build, it can operate against the branded Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers available on the machine (note that Playwright doesn't install them by default). Since the Chromium project is ahead of the branded browsers, when the world is on Google Chrome N, Playwright already supports Chromium N+1 that will be released in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge a few weeks later. Chromium įor Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and other Chromium-based browsers, by default, Playwright uses open source Chromium builds. To run on other/multiple browsers click the play button's dropdown from the testing sidebar and choose another profile or modify the default profile by clicking Select Default Profile and select the browsers you wish to run your tests on.Ĭhoose a specific profile, various profiles or all profiles to run tests on.

The VS Code test runner runs your tests on the default browser of Chrome.

Installing chromium