[Question] How to disable bringing page to front during launching.

[shirshak55]

Its Headful mode.

Currently I am doing web chat tests where I would like to test multiple context.

If I spawn new context it brings that page to front loosing the focus.

let browser = await firefox.launch()

// Every 1 minute open new context and open page just to test if chat shows history or not.
while(true) {
  let context = await browser.newContext()
  let page = await context.newPage();
  
  // delay code is there not shown here.

}

The issue is that newContext spawns a new window which has focus or something is in page that is calling page.bringToFront() when its launched.

Questions:

1. I would like to disable these behavior. If possible please let me know.
2. Is there anyway to minimize the context window after launch. If I need to bring page to front I think i can call page.bringToFront() at the moment.

Its not a new issue I think and there are no answers available afaik.
puppeteer/puppeteer#5484
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53501564/hide-browser-in-puppeteer

[creage]

Well, we have a plenty of chat testing, and we have no issues running multiple browser instances. We have tests up to 4 users chatting at the same time, with no issues.

What exact problem do you have?

[shirshak55]

@creage the issue is focus stealing. For 2-3 edge case we tests manually and we spawn like new window after 5 sec interval. When testing manually we are typing and the browser come in front of face which is abit annoying.

[pavelfeldman]

Playwright emulates all pages as focused, what exactly do you mean by focus stealing?

[pavelfeldman]

Ah, you mean your scenarios are hybrid and the focus is stolen from the person performing the manual steps? Can I ask why you are typing manually?

[shirshak55]

@pavelfeldman Yea its like when we are doing some work on one window and if another window is spawned focus is stolen from the person doing manual steps. Sometime we need to do it for accessibility check in headful mode and is mostly from devops team.

[pavelfeldman]

I don't think we can do anything about it (focusing), but we could try helping automating those a11y checks!

[shirshak55]

alright then I shall close this issue :) I also think its probably firefox or chrome issue

Thanks.

[bstro]

I also experience this; its pretty annoying to have jest running with --watch while developing and have focus stolen away constantly by the playwright. It seems like it has to be possible to have an option to instruct playwright to open Chromium in the background, rather than foreground.

[ThatGuySam]

There's a command I figured out on macOS to start iOS Simulator in the background which reliably disables it from taking focus.

open -g -a Simulator

However, I'm unsure how to launch Playwright's Chromium with this option

[sneko]

I was also surprised there is no way to prevent bringing it to front and loosing focus.

My workaround is to have "reusable pages" (1 if your program is simple, or X if you have a X as concurrency). You wait for a created page instance to be marked as available (with a mutex or so) to reuse it.

Make sure to clear all listeners if you added some, or the storage if you don't want it to be shared. It's a bit more at risk... but for now that's the only viable solution when headless: true does not fit the use case.

[Andrew-Chen-Wang]

This apparently really only affects chromium and only when launching a new page or launchPersistentContext. Added a PR: #41282