Logged in to sites, but the browser window opened by Playwright is not logged in

[alza-bitz]

Hi there,

My setup is as follows, I'm on Windows with MS edge, using Playwright with VSCode dev containers..

1. Login to a website xyz, any can be used
2. Start Playwright with npx @playwright/mcp@latest --port 8931 --browser msedge
3. Open VSCode, create and start a VSCode dev container
4. Install MCP server in VSCode with user settings:

    "mcp": {
        "servers": {
            "playwright-host": {
                "url": "http://localhost:8931/sse"
            }
        }
    }

5. Open CoPilot in agent mode and add all Playwright tools
6. Prompt CoPilot with a simple instruction, e.g. open website xyz

Expected:
Playwright opens a browser window on the host with site xyz, and it is logged in

Actual:
Playwright opens a browser window on the host with site xyz, but it is not logged in.

So it works, except for being logged in. Some kind of problem with cookies or sessions not being propagated, or did I do something wrong with my setup steps?

Note: I'm connecting to the Playwright MCP server using HTTP instead of a Playwright node module installed in the container, because I am issuing my CoPilot prompts from dev containers but I want to communicate with my host browser rather than some headless browser installed in the container.

Thanks 🙏

[pavelfeldman]

You can't automate the browser that uses default browsing profile as per Chrome/Edge policy. You need to log in inside the browser profile that MCP uses. So navigate to page using mcp, log in and it will remember it.

[alza-bitz]

You can't automate the browser that uses default browsing profile as per Chrome/Edge policy. You need to log in inside the browser profile that MCP uses. So navigate to page using mcp, log in and it will remember it.

Ah ok, understood. I just tried this, but it isn't "remembering" my login. As in, for the first prompt I login, but then for a the second prompt (to the exact same url) I am not logged in.

Although, the example site I'm using is Spotify, and I don't see any "remember me" option, so in that case I suppose Spotify is most likely using Cookies at session scope rather than persistent cookies? That could explain it..

Also, when I look in my Edge profiles, I don't see anything other than the default.. So is the profile used by Playwright a temporary profile created for each prompt/conversation and then deleted afterwards? Or hidden in some way?

[Skn0tt]

By default, Playwright MCP creates its own profile in the ms-playwright directory, and we reuse that between prompts. (would be different if you passed the --isolated argument). So Spotify cookies should be persisted.

In my normal Edge, I remain logged in across sessions, but I can reproduce that this is not the case in Playwright MCP. My guess would be that the browser is (falsely) being detected by some sort of Anti-Bot system - Spotify is big into that.

[alza-bitz]

Ah ok, understood. I can see the profile dir on my host:

PS C:\Users\alex> dir .\AppData\Local\ms-playwright\


    Directory: C:\Users\alex\AppData\Local\ms-playwright


Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
d-----        25/06/2025     18:46                mcp-msedge-profile

In my normal Edge, I remain logged in across sessions, but I can reproduce that this is not the case in Playwright MCP. My guess would be that the browser is (falsely) being detected by some sort of Anti-Bot system - Spotify is big into that.

I repeated my test but with Google instead of Spotify, and got the result I expected: my login was persisted between CoPilot prompts / sessions! So it looks like the problem I encountered is something specific to Spotify as you say, and I imagine it would be difficult to work around :/

Typical that the first site I picked to do some automation doesn't work! In any case, recent news about Spotify makes me want to look for alternatives anyway.

Thanks for the insights, I'll close this issue now :)