Goodbye Playwright, Hello CDP: A New Era in AI Browser Automation

In the realm of AI browser automation, developers have long relied on adapter libraries like Playwright. However, these libraries' abstraction layers obscure the underlying complexities of browsers, leading to performance bottlenecks and difficult-to-solve edge cases. This article details how a team abandoned Playwright and directly used the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to build a faster and more reliable AI browser automation system. They developed a new Python CDP client library, `cdp-use`, and adopted an event-driven architecture, achieving cross-origin iframe support and significantly improving element extraction and screenshot speeds. This transition, while challenging, ultimately resulted in finer-grained control over the browser and more robust error handling, ushering in a new chapter for AI browser automation.