`settleBeforeMeasure` ends with a `waitForLoadState("networkidle")` whose
rejection is swallowed and a `page.evaluate` awaiting
`document.fonts.ready`. Both are written to end on their own terms, and
neither had a bound: the config leaves `actionTimeout` and
`navigationTimeout` unset, which Playwright reads as no limit, so a
single sub-resource that never completes consumes the whole test budget
rather than the wait.
The way it surfaces is the worst part. The swallowed timeout hides the
stall, the run reports whichever call was still pending when the fixture
closed the page, and the message reads
Test timeout of 30000ms exceeded.
Error: page.evaluate: Target page, context or browser has been closed
which names neither the surface nor the resource. Raising the budget
changes nothing, because no budget bounds an unbounded wait.
Route one font request to a handler that never answers and the current
code reproduces that message exactly; with the bound in place the same
run reaches the spec's own assertion in twelve seconds.
Six seconds is an order of magnitude above the slowest settle measured
across the suite (1.1 s, /insights at a mobile viewport).
The over-scroll guard measured a settings page while two of its cards were
still showing their loading state, and read a height that no longer existed a
moment later. The page was blamed for a second scroll surface it did not have.
The gate waited on the layout shell, which is present long before the data
under it, and its own documentation says a sentinel has to be something the
measurement depends on. It now also waits for the loading placeholders the app
marks in the markup, and gives up quietly rather than failing if one legitimately
stays, since a timeout would be a worse failure than the one being prevented.
Four specs navigated and then read the DOM once, with nothing in between
that waits for anything but the network. An idle network says nothing about
whether React has rendered, so the read can sample a tree that is still
mounting and the assertion then blames the application for a race inside the
test. Two such reads went red on consecutive CI runs, on different specs.
The settings over-scroll guard also slept a fixed 500 ms, which is the wrong
shape twice over: too long when the page is ready, too short on a loaded
runner, and it never says what it is waiting for.
The structural guard runs in the unit suite rather than in Playwright,
because e2e runs at PR-CI only and flaky counts as failed there — one
unguarded read otherwise costs a whole pipeline before anyone sees it. It
refuses to count a wait whose rejection is thrown away, since that reads
like a guarantee and is not one, and would leave the check defeatable by
appending a catch. The one deliberate swallow is on the allowlist with its
reason: a genuine regression there still fails at the width assertion below
it, which reports the measured number instead of a timeout message.
Marc-André Bombeck