Playwright 1.35 Released: UI Mode Comes to VS Code

What happened

Playwright 1.35 was released on June 8, 2023, according to the official GitHub release notes. The release focused on tooling and the developer experience around debugging and inspecting tests.

UI mode in VS Code

The headline was that UI mode became available in the VS Code Playwright extension through a new Show trace viewer button. UI mode and the trace viewer also began marking network requests handled by page.route and browserContext.route handlers, as well as those issued via API testing, making it clearer which requests were intercepted during a test run.

Screenshots and CLI

The release added a maskColor option to the screenshot and toHaveScreenshot methods, letting developers change the default masking color used to overlay masked elements. It also added an uninstall CLI command to remove browser binaries installed by Playwright, with an --all flag to remove all Playwright browsers ever installed.

Browser tabs and a breaking change

Both UI mode and the trace viewer could now be opened in a browser tab using a --ui-port or --port of 0 to pick a random port. As a breaking change, the playwright-core binary was renamed from playwright to playwright-core, so users of the playwright-core CLI needed to update the command; this did not affect users of the @playwright/test or playwright packages.

Why it mattered

Playwright 1.35 tightened the loop between writing and debugging tests by bringing UI mode into the editor and the browser. Better visibility into intercepted network requests and more flexible screenshot masking made the framework's already strong debugging tools more accessible.

Related on Skillo

See also: Playwright 1.20 and fully parallel mode, Playwright 1.45's Clock API.

Sources

• Playwright v1.35.0 release notes (GitHub)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-06-08). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.