Opening a page

Learn how to create and open a Page with a Browser, and how to use it to visit and programmatically interact with a website.

---

When you open up your regular browser and visit a website, you open up a new page (or tab) before entering the URL in the search bar and hitting the Enter key. In Playwright and Puppeteer, you also have to open up a new page before visiting a URL. This can be done with the browser.newPage() function, which will return a Page object (Puppeteer, Playwright).

Playwright

import { chromium } from 'playwright';

const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: false });

// Open a new page
const page = await browser.newPage();

await browser.close();

Puppeteer

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });

// Open a new page
const page = await browser.newPage();

await browser.close();

Then, we can visit a website with the page.goto() method. Let's go to Google for now. We'll also use the page.waitForTimeout() function, which will force the program to wait for a number of seconds before quitting (otherwise, everything will just flash before our eyes and we won't really be able to tell what's going on):

Playwright

import { chromium } from 'playwright';

const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: false });

// Open a new page
const page = await browser.newPage();

// Visit Google
await page.goto('https://google.com');

// wait for 10 seconds before shutting down
await page.waitForTimeout(10000);

await browser.close();

Puppeteer

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });

// Open a new page
const page = await browser.newPage();

// Visit Google
await page.goto('https://google.com');

// wait for 10 seconds before shutting down
await page.waitForTimeout(10000);

await browser.close();

If you haven't already, go ahead and run this code to see what happens.

Next up

Now that we know how to open up a page, let's learn how to automate page interaction, such as clicking, typing, and pressing keys.