Supporting track

Playwright

Auto-waiting, contexts and tracing — modern browser automation.

What this track covers

Locators & auto-waitingBrowser contextsFixturesNetwork interceptionTrace viewerParallel workersAPI testing built inSelenium migration strategy

Auto-waiting locators

Playwright locators re-resolve and run actionability checks, removing most explicit waits.

Why it is required: It eliminates the largest category of Selenium flakiness by design.

Example: A login test with zero explicit waits.

typescript

1test('user can log in', async ({ page }) => {
2  await page.goto('/login');
3  await page.getByLabel('Username').fill('standard_user');
4  await page.getByLabel('Password').fill('secret_sauce');
5  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Login' }).click();
6 
7  await expect(page.getByRole('heading', { name: 'Products' })).toBeVisible();
8});

Expected result

Stable execution without a single wait statement.

Common mistakes

Using page.waitForTimeout() out of Selenium habit
CSS/XPath instead of role and label locators
Sharing one context across tests and losing isolation

How does Playwright's auto-waiting differ from Selenium's explicit waits?

Related interview questions

Open bank

Why would you migrate from Selenium to Playwright?
Auto-waiting, browser contexts for cheap isolation, built-in tracing/network interception, and much faster parallel execution — but Selenium wins on legacy browser support and ecosystem.
How do Playwright fixtures, projects and auto-waiting change framework design?
Fixtures replace base classes for setup, projects replace testng.xml for browser/environment matrices, and web-first assertions with auto-waiting remove most explicit wait code.
How does Playwright auto-waiting differ from Selenium waits?
Playwright checks actionability (attached, visible, stable, enabled, receives events) before every action and retries until the timeout, so explicit waits are rarely needed.
Which locators do you prefer in Playwright and why?
Role-based and label-based locators first (getByRole, getByLabel), then getByTestId; raw CSS/XPath last because they couple tests to markup.
How do you reuse authentication instead of logging in per test?
Log in once in a setup project, save the session with storageState, and load that state in the config so each test starts signed in.
How do you mock or intercept network calls in Playwright?
page.route intercepts matching requests so you can fulfil them with fixtures, abort them, or modify the response — ideal for error states and third-party isolation.