A hands-on comparison of how Cypress and Playwright differ in browser access during test development. Cypress runs tests inside a real browser with the app in an iframe, sharing the JavaScript event loop — meaning pausing app code also pauses the test and vice versa. Playwright, by contrast, shows DOM snapshots in its UI mode rather than a live browser, and runs the test runner and app as separate processes, so pausing one does not pause the other. Both tools offer step-through debugging via page.pause and cy.pause, but the shared event loop in Cypress provides a tighter debugging experience when inspecting live application state.
7 Impressions