How to Save 4GB by Pointing Puppeteer and Playwright to System Chrome

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Browser automation tools like Puppeteer and Playwright silently download gigabytes of Chromium builds even when Google Chrome is already installed on a machine. On macOS, these cached browser builds can collectively consume more than 4 GB of disk space across separate cache directories. Developers can redirect both tools to use the system-installed Google Chrome instead — via an environment variable for Puppeteer and a channel setting for Playwright. This approach works across Puppeteer, Playwright Test, Playwright CLI, and Playwright MCP, covering most local development scenarios. The technique is intended as a local optimization and is not a substitute for Playwright's pinned browser builds used in production or CI environments.

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