1. Where Playwright is Used

Overview

Web UI test automation (functional, regression, E2E) This is the primary use case and the one this manual focuses on almost entirely. cart" button add an item?). after every deploy doesn't scale. testing one isolated piece. API testing Playwright isn't just a browser tool — it ships APIRequestContext, letting you send raw HTTP requests (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE) without a browser at all. This means one tool can cover both your UI layer and your backend API layer, instead of maintaining Playwright Part 4, Chapter 18. Visual regression testing Beyond "does the button work," this asks "does the page still look right?" Playwright can take a screenshot and pixel-diff it against a saved baseline image, catching things functional tests would completely miss — like a CSS change that accidentally makes text invisible, or a layout shift that pushes a button off-screen. Covered in depth in Chapter 19. Web scraping / data extraction Because Playwright can fully render JavaScript-heavy pages (unlike simple HTTP-request-based scrapers), it's also popular for scraping sites that load content dynamically. This is a side use case — not the manual's focus — but worth knowing it exists since it sometimes comes up in interviews or side projects.