Isolation

Tests written with Playwright execute in isolated clean-slate environments called browser contexts. This isolation model improves reproducibility and prevents cascading test failures.

BrowserContexts are equivalent to incognito-like profiles, they are fast and cheap to create and completely isolated, even when running in a single browser. Playwright creates a context for each test, and provides a default Page in that context.

When using Playwright as a Test Runner, this happens out of the box for each test. Otherwise, you can create browser contexts manually.

Sync

browser = playwright.chromium.launch()
context = browser.new_context()
page = context.new_page()

Async

browser = await playwright.chromium.launch()
context = await browser.new_context()
page = await context.new_page()

Browser contexts can also be used to emulate multi-page scenarios involving mobile devices, permissions, locale and color scheme. Check out our Emulation guide for more details.

Multiple contexts in a single test

Playwright can create multiple browser contexts within a single scenario. This is useful when you want to test for multi-user functionality, like a chat.

Sync

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

def run(playwright):
    # create a chromium browser instance
    chromium = playwright.chromium
    browser = chromium.launch()

    # create two isolated browser contexts
    user_context = browser.new_context()
    admin_context = browser.new_context()

    # create pages and interact with contexts independently

with sync_playwright() as playwright:
    run(playwright)

Async

import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright

async def run(playwright):
    # create a chromium browser instance
    chromium = playwright.chromium
    browser = await chromium.launch()

    # create two isolated browser contexts
    user_context = await browser.new_context()
    admin_context = await browser.new_context()

    # create pages and interact with contexts independently

async def main():
    async with async_playwright() as playwright:
        await run(playwright)
asyncio.run(main())