ms-playwright and Puppeteer browsers on Mac: safe to delete?
Where it is
~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright~/.cache/ms-playwright~/.cache/puppeteer~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright-go
What it is
Playwright and Puppeteer don't drive the browsers you have installed by default; they download their own builds of Chromium (and, for Playwright, Firefox and WebKit) into a shared cache. Test suites, scraping scripts and AI agents that browse the web all fill these folders, as does the Go port of Playwright.
Why it gets so big
Each Playwright or Puppeteer release pins specific browser revisions, so upgrading in one project downloads a fresh set while the old one stays behind. With several projects on different versions, you end up with multiple full browser builds side by side.
Is it safe to delete?
Usually yes. Nothing here is personal data, and the browsers are downloaded again the next time a project runs its browser install step or a tool fetches them on first use. It's flagged for review because the next test run or agent task will then need a network connection and a sizable download, so keep the versions you rely on if you often work offline.
Tip
After clearing, running Playwright's install step inside your active project brings back only the browser versions that project actually needs.
See how much space it uses
du -sh "$HOME/Library/Caches/ms-playwright" "$HOME/.cache/ms-playwright" "$HOME/.cache/puppeteer" "$HOME/Library/Caches/ms-playwright-go" 2>/dev/nullClean it with the tool’s own command
npx playwright uninstall --allDelete it by hand
Run in Terminal. Deleting cannot be undone, so check the paths first.
rm -rf "$HOME/Library/Caches/ms-playwright"/*
rm -rf "$HOME/.cache/ms-playwright"/*
rm -rf "$HOME/.cache/puppeteer"/*
rm -rf "$HOME/Library/Caches/ms-playwright-go"/*