How one clock drives the views#

A Playwright trace is a single file that records everything one browser session did. It holds the actions your script called, the events the page fired, the console output, every network request, and a screencast: a series of page screenshots taken through the run. Each action also keeps a snapshot of the page's structure at the moment it ran.

That one file is the whole job. The workspace gives you four views onto it.

One clock ties everything together#

The app rebases the times in a trace, so the first thing that happens sits at zero. From there, a single current time drives the whole workspace.

Move the playhead on the timeline and three things follow at once. The preview shows the page as it looked at that moment. The timeline marker lines up under the playhead. The most recent action at or before that time becomes the selected action, so the inspector shows its detail.

It also works the other way. Select a row in the events list and the inspector switches to it, because selection and playback share the same state.

Read across the views#

Everything shares one clock, so you read a trace when you move to a moment and look across the views. Line the playhead up with an action, see the page it produced, check the console and network activity around it, then open the row you care about to read its full detail.

Nothing leaves your machine#

The app reads the trace on your machine and uploads nothing. It holds any colours and comments you add for the session only, and it does not write them back into the file, so they clear when you close the tab. See Annotations.