Playwright's page.route() silently disables Chrome caching, 5x slower e2e tests
Vjeux · x · 2026-10-23
Vjeux shares a counterintuitive find: using page.route() in Playwright disables Chrome's HTTP caching, making every request expensive—page loads went from 0.5s to 3.5s for their app, and their large e2e suite became 5x slower for no obvious reason.
The linked GitHub issue (microsoft/playwright #22865) confirms isolated browser contexts don't share disk cache, so static resources can't be reused across tests; the feature request remains open. Teams using route interception should account for this hidden cost.
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