[HN Gopher] Playwright Tools for MCP
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Playwright Tools for MCP
Author : alex_hirner
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-03-26 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| the_arun wrote:
| Is this for test automation? or for using Playwright as
| "Operator" in an Agent?
| codybontecou wrote:
| I think it's to give the LLM control of your browser.
| bdcravens wrote:
| So instead of specifying explicit selectors, etc, you just
| use a prompt? (like "Go to eBay.com, search for Playstation
| 5, and click on the first result that isn't a promoted
| listing")
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, exactly. It defaults to using the Chrome accessibility
| tree but it can also be run so it uses Claude's vision
| feature against screenshots instead.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Click the link and find out.
| mgdev wrote:
| This is so good. I've been using it with Claude Code with great
| success.
|
| I just leave an instruction in CLAUDE.md to validate changes with
| Playwright. It automatically starts a dev server (wrote a little
| MCP server to do that), navigates to the page with the changes it
| just made, and validates that its changes worked. If there is
| anything unexpected, it self-corrects.
|
| It's like working with a really great mid-level engineer.
|
| What a time to be alive.
| codybontecou wrote:
| Interesting use-case. Can you give an example of a prompt you
| use that triggers this tool? Are you validating UI changes
| (button color), navigation, or something more complex?
| maleldil wrote:
| Claude Code is amazing. Unfortunately, it's also very
| expensive. How do interactions with MCP servers affect token
| usage/cost?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Submitted acouple times, would love to hear more.
|
| Note also, there's a Fetch-MCP which is playwright based,
| supports batch. Would be interesting to compare.
| https://github.com/jae-jae/fetch-mcp
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43419713 (64 points, 6 days
| ago, 14 comments)
| mettamage wrote:
| I don't know playwright, but how is this different than
| puppeteer?
|
| The issue I'm noticing with puppeteer is that it isn't always
| successful to immediately get the right javascript to complete a
| simple task such as accepting a cookie consent banner, for
| example.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Playwright is a bit of an evolution of Puppeteer. Mostly the
| same API, extends the API a bit (I tend to prefer its
| abstractions over Puppeteer), and designed to work with
| multiple browsers. It came from many of the same developers as
| Puppeteer.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Does Playwright work with multiple browsers? I get the
| impression it can work with multiple engines, but they're
| just custom wrappers and not the full/original browsers.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| I want an MCP for capybara so LLMs can write my Rails system
| tests and debug them when they don't work.
| mazacx5volvo240 wrote:
| Watermarking and synthesizing text for hosts and clients,
| private RAG over Slack MCP implementations would disperse LLM's
| to Local Data Souce: A, B, and remote server C.
|
| [1]:https://dlsp2024.ieee-security.org/wagner.pdf
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| It seems this new tool from Microsoft is a competitor to
| https://github.com/executeautomation/mcp-playwright
|
| The Microsoft one seems simpler, whereas the other one has more
| tools.
| atonse wrote:
| I'm going to see if I can use this in combination with our JIRA
| MCP to read a bug ticket's "steps to reproduce" to see if it
| translate those steps to actually reproduce those actions.
|
| I don't understand the hate against MCP. It is truly exciting to
| see the Cambrian explosion of "connectors" coming out.
|
| This is going to be the "App Store" for models in a way that
| OpenAI's custom GPTs never was.
| lxe wrote:
| It uses ariaSnapshot, which is an accessible representation of
| the DOM used by screen readers and accessibility validation tools
| as well as playwright testing.
|
| However, even with that, it will quickly exhaust the model
| context if you navigate to something like Gmail. I just verified
| this with cursor.
|
| I've been playing around with a much better textual
| representation of the page that's much more compact:
|
| https://github.com/lxe/chrome-mcp/blob/master/src/runtime-te...
|
| This uses your own chrome session and doesn't require a huge
| context size.
|
| I might refactor this to use the aria interface available to the
| CDP, which I wasn't aware of at the time.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I agree -- I hacked up a CDP-driven MCP so that Claude can
| drive your own browser instance, and I think that's more in the
| spirit of how MCP is supposed to work (where it's driving your
| tools under supervision, rather than spinning up its own
| context)
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| "code --add-mcp"
|
| Vscode comes with a built in MCP client ?
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