Playwright 1.20 Released: Fully Parallel Tests and Screenshot Masking

What happened

Playwright 1.20 was released on March 14, 2022, according to the official GitHub release notes. The release strengthened Playwright's visual-testing and parallelism capabilities, key concerns for teams running large end-to-end test suites.

Screenshot options

Playwright 1.20 added new options to the screenshot methods on page, locator and element handle. An animations: disabled option rewinds all CSS animations and transitions to a consistent state to avoid flaky visual comparisons, and a mask option overlays given elements with pink boxes to hide dynamic content from screenshots.

Snapshots and diff thresholds

The toMatchSnapshot assertion gained support for anonymous snapshots, automatically generating a snapshot name when one is missing, and new maxDiffPixels and maxDiffPixelRatio options for fine-grained screenshot comparison, which can be set once in the test config's expect settings. These made visual regression testing more forgiving of minor, acceptable differences.

Parallelism and debugging

The release added a fullyParallel mode: by default Playwright Test parallelizes between files, but in fully parallel mode tests inside a single file also run in parallel, configurable in the config or via a command-line flag. It also made grep and grepInvert configurable per project, for example to define a smoke-tests project, showed API testing requests in the trace viewer, and added locator.highlight to visually reveal elements for debugging.

Why it mattered

Playwright 1.20 improved both the speed and the stability of test suites. Fully parallel mode cut execution time for large files, while the animation, masking and diff-threshold options addressed the flakiness that often plagues visual regression testing, making Playwright a more dependable choice for end-to-end testing.

Related on Skillo

See also: Playwright 1.35's UI mode in VS Code.

Sources

• Playwright v1.20.0 release notes (GitHub)

Published date reflects the original event date (2022-03-14). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.