From Playwright Routing to Browser Protocols: How Request Interception Works
This article follows Playwright's request interception all the way down to the browser protocol. We'll look at how Playwright intercepts requests using page.route() and how it works in different browsers. Then we'll see how to implement request interception using only Chromium's DevTools Protocol. And, finally, we will look at some examples where the knowledge about browser communication can help us in practice.
Our goal is not to replace frameworks with low-level APIs, but to understand what capabilities the browser actually exposes, and when working with underlying protocols can be useful.
All information and examples in this article are current as of September 2026. Browser automation protocols change quickly, so some details may change over time.
The runnable examples are available in the sample repo.
Playwright’s page.route() lets us intercept a request made by the browser and decide how to handle it. We can let the request continue, stop it,...
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