How to Correctly Configure Proxies, Sticky Sessions, and Blocking in Playwright

Playwright handles proxy authentication differently from standard HTTP clients, requiring credentials to be passed in the launch configuration rather than embedded in the server URL. A key limitation is that Chromium, which powers Playwright's default browser, does not support username and password authentication over SOCKS5, making HTTP proxy ports with CONNECT tunneling the recommended alternative. Because a single page load triggers dozens of sub-requests, proxy rotation should happen at the browser context level rather than per request, ensuring all assets load from the same IP to avoid triggering anti-bot systems. Developers can pin a session ID per browser context to maintain a consistent exit IP throughout a browsing session, then rotate by spawning a new context with a fresh session ID. To reduce costs on bandwidth-billed residential proxies, unnecessary resource types such as images, fonts, and stylesheets can be blocked via Playwright's route API, since only the raw HTML is typically needed for scraping.