[Feature]: Minimal Driver-Only Bundle for Playwright Java

[ksn5]

🚀 Feature Request

In remote/CDP-only setups (e.g., chromium().connectOverCDP()), Playwright Java only needs the driver binary, not bundled browser binaries.

Currently, driver-bundle includes all browsers (~200 MB), causing heavy downloads and disk usage across multiple machines in scaled environments.

Proposal
Publish a new lightweight Maven artifact (e.g., playwright-driver-only) that contains only the Playwright driver (~1 MB) without browsers. Optionally provide platform-specific variants (linux, windows, mac).

Benefits

• Removes unnecessary 200 MB downloads/extractions.
• Faster builds and provisioning in CI/CD or containerized environments.
• Ideal for large-scale remote/CDP-based automation.

Example

com.microsoft.playwright playwright-driver-only 1.55.0

Motivation

driver-bundle currently includes all browser binaries (~200 MB), even when only the driver is needed for remote/CDP connections (chromium().connectOverCDP()).

A lightweight driver-only artifact (~1 MB) would remove unnecessary downloads, speed up CI/CD provisioning, and save disk space in large-scale remote setups.

[yury-s]

Currently, driver-bundle includes all browsers (~200 MB), causing heavy downloads and disk usage across multiple machines in scaled environments.

No, it does not. The browsers are installed separately. The driver includes Node.js binaries for all supported platforms though. This can be improved by splitting the drivers per platform, it is tracked in #1196.