How to speed up your Playwright scripts with request interception
AI Summary
This YouTube video provides a Playwright tip focused on speeding up end-to-end testing by using request interception. The speaker demonstrates a script that loads a webpage and takes a screenshot, noting that while a single test running a bit slower might not matter, it’s critical to optimize when running many tests. He explains how to monitor network requests and identifies unnecessary resource loads like stylesheets, images, and fonts that can be blocked. By using Playwright’s page.route function to intercept and abort specific requests, the test loading time is significantly reduced—demonstrated by reducing webpage loading time from roughly two seconds down to 500 milliseconds faster. The video highlights the benefits of request interception for making automated tests more efficient and concludes with an encouragement to try this method to speed up scripts.