What is Stale Element Exception and how does it work in Playwright?

Stale Element Exception in the context of Playwright is an error that occurs when the element on the page with which an interaction is attempted is no longer current or has been changed/removed after it was found.

In Playwright, there is no explicit "Stale Element Exception" like in Selenium. Playwright automatically updates references to elements and tries to work with the current state of the DOM. However, if the element changes between the moment of search and interaction, an error may occur indicating that the element no longer exists or is inaccessible.

How Playwright handles this:

• Playwright uses locators, which dynamically search for the element at each interaction rather than storing a static reference.
• This reduces the likelihood of errors related to stale elements.

Example:

const { chromium } = require('playwright');
(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');

  const button = page.locator('button#submit');
  await button.click(); // Playwright finds the element at the moment of click

  await browser.close();
})();

If the DOM changes and the element disappears, Playwright will throw an error, for example, that the element is not found or not visible, but not a "Stale Element Exception" in the classical sense.

Thus, Playwright minimizes issues with stale elements through dynamic searching and locators.