Playwright fixtures are convenient, but their execution order can be hard to see from code alone. I used timeline reports to visualize test- and worker-scoped fixtures, their dependencies, overrides, and auto-loading mode.
The practical takeaway: always check fixture scope and dependencies. A fixture that looks small in code can still significantly affect test performance.
I've noticed that the Playwright team closes quite a few highly upvoted feature requests/issues as not planned.
I completely understand that maintaining a project of this size requires strong prioritization, and that upvotes alone can’t drive the roadmap. Also not every feature request is a good fit for the project.
Still, I sometimes find it frustrating to see issues with a lot of community interest get closed rather quickly. Especially when those issues represent real pain points for advanced or large-scale use cases.
I’m curious how others in the community feel about this.
My second article in the series. A quick visual breakdown of why Playwright workers restart and what it means in practice:
https://medium.com/@vitaliypotapov/playwright-in-pictures-why-workers-restart-148c2ef250ef
A few months ago I had an idea to build a custom Playwright reporter. I wanted to visualize my test runs on a timeline. The goal was simple: understand how tests are spread across workers and where time is being lost.
At first I thought I would vibe-code it quickly. But it took much longer than expected. Playwright reporter APIs made some parts tricky, especially measuring the actual test body and placing tests correctly on worker lanes.
At some point my wife started calling it "sausages", because she kept seeing these long colored bars on my screen all the time :)
But it was worth it. After the release, I ran the reporter on a real project and got useful insights (see the screenshot).
We run our e2e tests on CI with 4 shards. One worker was running a single large test file (blue bars) that was twice as long as the others. That explained the overall slowdown. The fix was simple: split the file or enable fully parallel mode.
Since then, I've fixed a few issues and made the reporter stable enough to share:
Repo: https://github.com/vitalets/playwright-timeline-reporter
Live demo: https://vitalets.github.io/playwright-timeline-reporter/demos/index.html
I'd appreciate your feedback ❤️