[REQUEST] Use persistent browser context as option

[skye0402]

Currently Playwright is opening a new browser context every time. This can be useful but all cookies, authentication and caching will be done from scratch.

I propose an option to start it with context. e.g. with parameters

use_context: bool # Default can be False
user_data_dir: str # The path to the folder that holds the browser data (Playwright creates it at first use)

I did some quick fix and it works well in browser/service.py

async def _setup_browser(self, playwright: Playwright) -> PlaywrightBrowser:
        """Sets up and returns a Playwright Browser instance with anti-detection measures."""
        try:
            user_data_dir = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'playwright_user_data')
            browser = await playwright.chromium.launch_persistent_context(
                user_data_dir=user_data_dir,
                headless=self.headless,
                viewport={'width': 1280, 'height': 1024},
                ignore_default_args=['--enable-automation'],  # Helps with anti-detection
                args=[
                    '--no-sandbox',
                    '--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled',
                    '--disable-extensions',
                    '--disable-infobars',
                    '--disable-background-timer-throttling',
                    '--disable-popup-blocking',
                    '--disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows',
                    '--disable-renderer-backgrounding',
                    '--disable-window-activation',
                    '--disable-focus-on-load',  # Prevents focus on navigation
                    '--no-first-run',
                    '--no-default-browser-check',
                    # '--no-startup-window',  # Prevents initial focus
                    '--window-position=0,0',
                ],
            )

            return browser
        except Exception as e:
            logger.error(f'Failed to initialize Playwright browser: {str(e)}')
            raise

    async def _create_context(self, browser: Union[PlaywrightBrowser, BrowserContext])::
        """Creates a new browser context with anti-detection measures."""
        if isinstance(browser, BrowserContext): # to check if it's a Browser or BrowserContext object
            context = browser
        else:
            context = await browser.new_context(
                viewport={'width': 1280, 'height': 1024},
            user_agent=(
                'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 '
                '(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.102 Safari/537.36'
            ),
            java_script_enabled=True,
        )

Of course it needs the proper switching in _setup_browser - as you can see the --no-startup-window is commented out, it would lead to an endless loop. However, it works well without it.

What do you think? Loading is much, much faster now.

[MagMueller]

Thank you very much. This stores all cookies automatically?

and you mean when use_context is false it does not use launch_persistent_context

[skye0402]

@MagMueller yes, 100%. Default should be as it's now. For users that want persistence between the sessions they need to specify a folder and state True. It behaves then like our usual browser with cache and cookies. However, certificate prompts still pop up. Need to look into this later (different issue).

[MagMueller]

Great - can you do a PR with your version?

Do you know good ways do directly integrate addblockers ?