Launching a Browser

Three nested things: Playwright, browser, page

Getting from "nothing" to "a page I can read" involves three layers, and it helps to keep them straight before writing any code:

1. Playwright itself, the driver process that knows how to talk to browsers. You get a handle to it from sync_playwright(). 2. A browser, one running instance of Chromium, launched from that driver with p.chromium.launch(). This is an actual OS process, you could see it in your system's process list. 3. A context, then a page, inside that browser. A context is an isolated session (its own cookies, its own storage, like a fresh private browsing window), and a page is one tab inside it. You'll almost always want at least one context and one page before you can do anything useful.

This lesson only gets as far as creating an empty context and page, proving the browser is alive. Lesson 4 actually navigates somewhere.

Why with sync_playwright() as p:

sync_playwright() returns something Python calls a context manager, which is why it's used with with ... as p: instead of a plain assignment. The practical benefit: whatever happens inside that indented block, even an error, Python guarantees the driver process gets shut down when the block ends. Every lesson from here on uses this same with pattern, and every browser, context, and page opened inside it gets explicitly closed before the block ends.

Headless versus headed

p.chromium.launch(headless=True) starts a browser with no visible window, this is the default, and it's what you want for scripts, servers, and automated agents: no display needed, faster, lighter. Passing headless=False instead opens a real window you can watch, which is genuinely useful while you're first learning, seeing the browser click and type in real time makes debugging far easier. This course defaults to headless in its code, but try flipping it to False locally at least once, just to watch it work.

The code, piece by piece

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=True)

Starts the driver, then starts one Chromium process. browser is now a live, running browser, just with nothing open in it yet.

    print("Is connected:", browser.is_connected())

.is_connected() checks whether Playwright still has a working connection to that browser process. Useful as a sanity check, and a preview of the kind of state you can always ask a browser object about.

    context = browser.new_context()
    page = context.new_page()

A fresh, isolated session, then one tab inside it. Nothing is loaded into that tab yet, it exists but shows a blank page, about:blank.

    page.close()
    context.close()
    browser.close()

Closed in the reverse order they were opened: page first, then the context that held it, then the browser process itself. Skipping this doesn't crash anything immediately, but it leaves a real Chromium process running in the background, doing nothing, until your program exits or you kill it manually.