Closer to the Metal: Leaving Playwright for CDP

Summary

Goodbye Playwright, Hello CDP Playwright and Puppeteer are great for making QA tests and automation scripts short and readable, but as AI browser companies have been learning the hard way over the last year, sometimes these adapters obscure important details about the underlying browsers. We decided to peek behind the curtain and figure out what the browser was really doing, and it made us decide to drop playwright entirely and just speak the browser's native tongue: CDP. By switcing to raw CDP we've massively increased the speed of element extraction, screenshots, and all our default actions. We've also managed to add new async reaction capabilities to the agent, and proper cross-origin iframe support. Obviously we ignored the (wise) advice in the header of the getting-started-with-cdp docs 👌 The Curse of Abstraction Building AI browser automation is like building on top of a jenga tower of complexity. Every layer presents its own leaky abstractions, its own subtle crashes, and its own resource constraints. If you've ever heavily depended on an adapter library and build up a large codebase around it, you know the feeling that eventually comes when you realize the adapter library is no longer saving you any time by "hiding the true complexity". In our case that time has finally come for Browser-Use and playwright-python, the library that we've historically used to drive our browsers with LLM-powered tool calls like click, input_text, go_to_url. At first glance it may seem foolish to throw out such a mature adapter library and reinvent the wheel, but luckily the needs of AI browser agents are much narrower than the entire surface area that playwright provides, and we believe we can implement the calls we need with more specialized logic to better suit AI drivers. Playwright also introduces a 2nd network hop going through a node.js playwright server websocket, which incurs a meaningful amount of latency when we do thousands of CDP calls to check for element position, ...