Closer to the Metal: Leaving Playwright for CDP

A company building AI browser automation is moving away from the Playwright library to directly use the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). This decision was driven by the limitations and performance overhead of abstraction layers, which obscure underlying browser behavior and add latency. By switching to raw CDP, the team significantly increased the speed of actions like element extraction and screenshots while adding new capabilities like cross-origin iframe support. The content also details the history of browser automation and explains the various low-level APIs that browsers expose, such as CDP and Extension APIs.