natorion

Playwright is shipping patched browsers. They take the open source version of the browser and patch in e.g. CDP support or other things that make automation "better. Playwright does not work with a "normal" Safari for example.

You would be surprised how much we talked about that . New/old are just relevant for the transition period.

It's real Chromium, not emulating a Chromium browser. "Old" Headless was merely pretending to be a Chromium browser, the "New" Headless is a Chromium browser. "Old" Headless requires a parallel/duplicate implementation of features, which leads to subtle behavior differences or infeasability to support certain features e.g. extensions proper.

Here are two of them: -Test reproducibility -Automated configuration rollouts in enterprise environments

We regularly get feature requests for Headless to provide a field or property that can be polled by JS frameworks to detect if Headless is active e.g. windows.isBot.

Well, Headless is open source, which means anybody could build a Headless version with such a property set to "I am a human, trust me!" and employ such a modified binary ... ;-)

I fail to see the connection. Can you elaborate?

What rumors? Can you provide any links or context?

PM working on Headless here. Masking bots is not the reason why the new Headless mode was created. The goal is to provide an headless browser that can be used in web tests. The original Headless is essentially a separate browser implemented in parallel to "proper" Chromium. That results in all sorts of subtle reproducibility problems for developers using Headless for their tests.

I am the PM working on Headless. Feel free to ask questions in this thread and I will try to answer them if I can.

Edit: Please also note that we have not released New Headless yet. We "merely" landed the source code.

Can you please file a bug report on crbug.com?

Google in Germany is hiring quite alright.

You can enable it on Firefox nightly. I think the config name is something with shared_mem.