You Can Use Playwright to Test Your Site on WebKit
Written by Danny Krämer
Date: 3/14/2025
Cross-browser testing can be challenging, especially when testing WebKit browsers like Safari. If you are on Windows or Linux, you have to use tools like Browserstack to test on WebKit browsers like Safari because it is not available cross platform. But did you know that you can use Playwright to open a WebKit browser on any operating system? As Playwright can be used to run automated E2E-test cross-browser, it comes with its own bundled versions of every main browser engine and WebKit is one of them. Here is a very short tutorial on how it works.
Tutorial
Prerequisites
You need to have installed Node.js and npm.
Steps
- Open up your terminal/powershell and type
npx playwright install. - To open a URL in WebKit run the following command
npx playwright wk <your-url>
What you get is a WebKit browser with your URL opened. You can even use the WebKit Inspector. Depending on your operating system, not all features will be identical to the branded version of Safari. For that, you should use macOS. But still you can see how WebKit is rendering your site and identify some problems that may occur, without opening Browserstack or using an actual Apple device.
The Playwright documentation states the following:
Playwright’s WebKit is derived from the latest WebKit main branch sources, often before these updates are incorporated into Apple Safari and other WebKit-based browsers. This gives a lot of lead time to react on the potential browser update issues. Playwright doesn’t work with the branded version of Safari since it relies on patches. Instead, you can test using the most recent WebKit build.
Note that availability of certain features, which depend heavily on the underlying platform, may vary between operating systems. For example, available media codecs vary substantially between Linux, macOS and Windows. While running WebKit on Linux CI is usually the most affordable option, for the closest-to-Safari experience you should run WebKit on mac, for example if you do video playback.