Top 30 Playwright Interview Questions for Freshers (1970) — Land Your First QA Job

Playwright is an open-source test automation library built by Microsoft. It drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit via the DevTools Protocol, supports TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, and .NET, and is the 2026 default for greenfield web testing projects.

See our Selenium Q&A bank for the other side.

npm init -y
npm install -D @playwright/test
npx playwright install --with-deps chromium firefox webkit

page is a fixture provided by @playwright/test representing a single browser tab. Every test gets a fresh page by default — perfect isolation with no manual setup.

A locator is a query for an element that re-evaluates every time it's used. Unlike Selenium's findElement, locators are lazy and stable.

await page.getByTestId('submit').click();

1. page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Submit' }) — best, accessibility-first.
2. page.getByTestId('submit') — explicit test ID.
3. page.getByLabel('Email') — accessible labels.
4. page.getByText('Welcome') — text content.
5. page.locator('.btn-primary') — CSS fallback.

Playwright waits for elements to be visible, stable, receiving events, and enabled before acting. You almost never need sleep or waitForElement — kills 80% of the flakiness you see in Selenium suites.

import { expect } from '@playwright/test';

await expect(page).toHaveURL(/\/dashboard$/);
await expect(page.getByRole('heading')).toContainText('Welcome');
await expect(page.getByTestId('cart')).toHaveText('3');

All expect calls are auto-retrying — they keep polling until the assertion passes or times out.

The Trace Viewer is a standalone HTML tool that shows DOM snapshots, network calls, console logs, and a timeline for every step of a test. The fastest way to debug a failure. Enable with trace: 'on-first-retry' in playwright.config.ts.

@playwright/test runs tests in parallel by default. For CI, shard across machines with --shard=N/M and merge the JSON/HTML results.

POM is a design pattern where each page is a class with locators as properties and actions as methods. See our Playwright POM TypeScript guide for the full pattern.

const frame = page.frameLocator('#payment-iframe');
await frame.getByRole('button', { name: 'Pay' }).click();

const [newPage] = await Promise.all([
  context.waitForEvent('page'),
  page.getByTestId('open-new-tab').click(),
]);
await newPage.getByRole('heading').waitFor();

await page.route('**/api/users', route => route.fulfill({
  status: 200,
  body: JSON.stringify([{ id: 1, name: 'Test User' }]),
}));

It lets you test APIs in the same runner as UI tests — handy for setup/teardown via API and for pure API tests. See our API Testing Q&A for deeper patterns.

Add to playwright.config.ts:

use: { screenshot: 'only-on-failure' }

use: { video: 'retain-on-failure' }

await page.clock.install({ time: new Date('2026-06-27') });

The main config file where you set base URL, browsers, reporters, retries, timeouts, and parallelism. Treated as the single source of truth for the whole suite.

npx playwright test login.spec.ts --headed

Filters tests by name or tag:

npx playwright test --grep "@smoke"

test('login flow', { tag: '@smoke' }, async ({ page }) => { /* ... */ });

A hook that runs before every test in the describe block. Use it for shared setup like login or navigating to a base URL.

test.use({ storageState: 'auth.json' });

Generate auth.json once in a global setup and reuse across tests to skip the login flow.

Runs JavaScript in the browser context:

const token = await page.evaluate(() => localStorage.getItem('auth_token'));

await page.getByTestId('avatar').setInputFiles('avatar.png');

const download = await page.waitForEvent('download');
await download.saveAs('/tmp/report.pdf');

await page.getByTestId('item').dragTo(page.getByTestId('dropzone'));

test.use({ viewport: { width: 375, height: 667 } });

- run: npx playwright install --with-deps
- run: npx playwright test
- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
  if: ${{ !cancelled() }}
  with: { name: traces, path: test-results/ }

See our GitHub Actions CI guide for a deeper CI walkthrough.