Playwright Multi‑Tab IndexedDB Sync: The Browser Context Isolation Trap (6 Hours of Debugging)

At 1 a.m., the CI bot pinged me in our team chat for the tenth time: “Frontend multi-tab sync test failed.” This was already the third time this test case failed for our collaborative whiteboard project, and all I wanted was to sleep. After repeatedly digging through Playwright’s docs, I finally realized I had fallen into a particularly stupid trap— browser context isolation . I’ll lay out the whole debugging journey so you can save yourself some extra work. Problem breakdown Our frontend uses I