[Question]: How to get the right BrowserType from a device name?

[Rafiot]

Your question

I noticed that the CLI is able to figure out the right BrowserType to use when it is launched from the command line:

playwright open --device="Desktop Safari" wikipedia.org  # Webkit
playwright open --device="Desktop Firefox" wikipedia.org  # Firefox
playwright open --device="Desktop Chrome" wikipedia.org  # Chrome

But the documentation seems to say that I have to initialize a BrowserType before I can pass the settings to the context, which partially defeats the purpose of the device settings.

I can implement my own logic do initialize the right BrowserType for each device, but as playwright open can already do that, that seems superfluous.

[rwoll]

You can get it from the devices object: https://playwright.dev/python/docs/emulation#devices. It's a property in the dict returned when you do playwright.devices["Desktop Safari"]

[Rafiot]

I can get the settings, but I still need to initialize a browser (browser = await playwright.webkit.launch(headless=False)), and then initialize the context (context = await browser.new_context(**pixel_2)).

In my case, I want to start from the device name (say 'Pixel 2') and get the right BrowserType. And afaik, I can't figure that out without parsing the user agent, or manually mapping 'Pixel 2' to webkit in my code.

[rwoll]

Gotcha—looks like we are missing the defaultBrowserType property in the devices entries that are available in Node and could be used to programmatically pick playwright.{webkit,chromium,firefox}.

[Rafiot]

\o/ nice, thank you!

[rwoll]

For now, you can get the defaultBrowserType from https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/main/packages/playwright-core/src/server/deviceDescriptorsSource.json, but it should be exposed on playwright.devices['Pixel 2'] in the future.

[Rafiot]

Excellent, I'll use the dump for now and switch to that when available.

[rwoll]

@Rafiot Just shipped in v1.25.0 🎉 ! You can use it like the test does: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-python/pull/1497/files

[Rafiot]

Nice, thanks! And thinks for the hint, I didn't know I could get a browser like that: playwright[device_type]