Rust Version of Playwright Saves More Memory
suchintan · hn · 2026-07-16
The Skyvern team open-sourced Rustwright: a Playwright alternative rewritten in Rust that drives Chrome directly via raw CDP instead of using Playwright's Node driver.
Benchmark results show:
- Memory usage reduced by 70%
- Startup speed improved by 2.55x
The authors explained the motivation for the rewrite: during heavy internal browser automation, they found Playwright's driver wasted performance through extra processes, pipes, and middleware overhead. By eliminating this layer and communicating directly with Chrome via CDP, Rustwright reduces abstraction and resource consumption.
The post also mentions a side effect: without Playwright's driver, many Playwright fingerprinting traces disappear, such as the playwrightbinding global object and other common automation leakage signs.
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