Testing / Playwright Interview questions

What is the Trace Viewer in Playwright?

The Trace Viewer is a post-mortem debugging tool that replays exactly what happened during a test run, using a single recorded trace.zip file. It captures a DOM snapshot, screenshot, network activity, and console logs for every action, and lets you scrub through them like a timeline rather than guessing from log lines.

# in playwright.config.ts: trace: 'on-first-retry'
npx playwright show-trace trace.zip

Because tracing captures full DOM snapshots rather than just images, you can inspect the actual rendered HTML at the moment of failure, hover over elements, and even see which locator Playwright resolved to. Setting trace: 'on-first-retry' is the common CI setting - it keeps overhead low while still capturing detail exactly when a test starts to look flaky.

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Trace Viewer captures, for every action: Only a final screenshot

✗ Try again if not.

DOM snapshots, network activity, and console logs

✓ Correct! Well done.

Only the test's pass/fail result

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The trace: 'on-first-retry' config setting is popular in CI because it: Records traces for every single run, always

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Captures detail only when a test starts failing, keeping overhead low

✓ Correct! Well done.

Disables tracing completely

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