[Feature] Playwrights Estimated End-of-Support Timeline for Node Versions

[hawenger]

Our team needed to update Node as our version reached end-of-life. While evaluating the effects of various node versions on our dependencies, one of our engineers posed a great question,

"Does Playwright plan to support all Node versions until the version's end-of-life?"

Playwright's documentation on System Requirements was helpful for understanding present minimum Node Version requirements. The information in future focused documentation like an Estimated End-of-Support Plan for Node could present teams with the opportunity to perform valuable analysis (cost/benefit analysis, evaluate effort, etc) and could be especially effective when combined with a team's operational & ecosystem data, ultimately reducing technical debt.

While this type of analysis is valuable to many, I think it especially beneficial to teams that:

• work with legacy systems
• implement a mono-repo
• are small or resource strapped
• are part of a large organization
• work in highly dependent/dependency-coupled environment(s)
• work with critical technology (health, financial, government, infrastructure, logistics, etc)

I can also understand that such a feature may not make sense for Playwright to implement in present moment.
That being said, if the time isn't now or nigh, I think it could be of value in the future.

Discord Question

[pavelfeldman]

We intend to support Node version until it is past its maintenance phase (https://nodejs.dev/en/about/releases/). Note that security considerations might trigger accelerated deprecation, for example see microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent#4239. Playwright does not work in isolation, so if the major CI/CD providers like GitHub Actions choose to accelerate the deprecation due to security concerns, we are likely to align with their timelines.

[mxschmitt]

Closing as per above.