I’m trying to get playwright to be as close to a regular chrome browser instance as it can be, while also speeding up the loading by removing unneeded requests for things like images. While doing so I noticed that when I use the route function my http headers change substantially. Using the most up to date playwright and browsers as well.

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

def main():

    with sync_playwright() as playwright:
        browser = playwright.chromium.launch(channel='chromium', headless=False)
        context = browser.new_context()

        page = context.new_page()
        # page.route('**/*.{.jpg|png}', lambda route: route.abort())

        resp = page.goto('https://www.google.com')

        print(resp.request.all_headers())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

if you run the code with the line uncommented the headers change from the original.

original headers:

{':authority': 'www.google.com', ':method': 'GET', ':path': '/', ':scheme': 'https', 'accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7', 'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, 
br, zstd', 'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9', 'priority': 'u=0, i', 'sec-ch-ua': '"Chromium";v="131", "Not_A Brand";v="24"', 'sec-ch-ua-mobile': '?0', 'sec-ch-ua-platform': '"Windows"', 'sec-fetch-dest': 'document', 'sec-fetch-mode': 'navigate', 'sec-fetch-site': 'none', 'sec-fetch-user': '?1', 'upgrade-insecure-requests': '1', 'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'}

with routing:

{'accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7', 'upgrade-insecure-requests': '1', 'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36', 'sec-ch-ua': '"Chromium";v="131", "Not_A Brand";v="24"', 'sec-ch-ua-mobile': '?0', 'sec-ch-ua-platform': '"Windows"'}