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[Bug]: Windows console window pops up when launching chrome-headless-shell (processLauncher missing windowsHide) #41630
Description
System info
- Playwright: 1.58.2 (playwright-core)
- OS: Windows 11 (10.0.26200)
- Node: v22.23.1
- Browser: Chromium (
chrome-headless-shell, headless)
Summary
On Windows, launching Chromium opens a console window (a Windows Terminal window on Win11) for chrome-headless-shell.exe. The browser process is spawned without windowsHide, so chrome-headless-shell (a console-subsystem binary) gets a console window.
Root cause
src/server/utils/processLauncher.js builds spawnOptions with detached but never windowsHide:
const spawnOptions = {
detached: process.platform !== "win32",
env: options.env,
cwd: options.cwd,
shell: options.shell,
stdio
};
const spawnedProcess = childProcess.spawn(options.command, options.args || [], spawnOptions);On Windows, childProcess.spawn without windowsHide: true allocates a console window (windowsHide → CREATE_NO_WINDOW).
Fix
const spawnOptions = {
detached: process.platform !== "win32",
+ windowsHide: true,
env: options.env,
cwd: options.cwd,
shell: options.shell,
stdio
};Verification
Patched processLauncher.js in node_modules locally, restarted — the chrome-headless-shell console window no longer appears (confirmed via EnumWindows). Windows-only; no-op elsewhere.
Activity
triemerge commentedon Jul 6, 2026
This was actually fixed in #38776 but had to be reverted (#39994) because
windowsHide: truewas added unconditionally tolaunchProcess(), and that ended up hiding Inspector and codegen windows too since they go through the same path.I think the fix here is to make it opt-in so only headless launches get it. Will put up a PR.
pavelfeldman commentedon Jul 6, 2026
Can't reproduce this. Please share exact steps.
triemerge commentedon Jul 6, 2026
#40741 might be worth a look since it covers the same underlying thing.
dgozman commentedon Jul 14, 2026
We tried hard reproducing this issue, but were not able to. This seems very specific to your setup. Without a repro, we are not going to risk breaking users, sorry.
mxschmitt commentedon Jul 14, 2026
Dmitry Gozman (@dgozman) did you try reproducing with #40741 (comment)? This is similar to when other tools wrap Playwright e.g. coding agents and then it ends up in a similar issue.
Vistritium commentedon Jul 14, 2026
I don't have complicated setup, I use playwright-cli with codex and it happens all the time when codex is using playwright-cli.
tomfluff commentedon Jul 17, 2026
Thank you all for the comments and attempts to reproduce! For context, I use playwright-cli through gstack and it happened a lot. I also had to make some changes there which I opened a PR for (garrytan/gstack#2182 (comment)). I tried only the changes there without the playwright-cli changes and it seems to still happen so the change here might be important for it all to work.
vinhch commentedon Aug 7, 2026
Possibly relevant, though I'm not sure it's the same thing this issue describes.
#42152 reported a console window from a different spawn site (the CLI session daemon) and was fixed in #42155, which also happened to touch the
taskkillspawn insidelaunchProcess:That taskkill one is what I ran into on Windows 11 with @playwright/cli 0.1.18. The visible window belongs to
cmd.exe /d /s /c "taskkill /pid <browser> /T /F", spawned by the detachedcliDaemon.js. AddingwindowsHideto that single line makes it go away and reverting it brings it back. One thing that tripped me up while checking: counting processes doesn't show any difference, sinceCREATE_NO_WINDOWstill allocates a conhost, just an invisible one. I had to pollEnumWindows+IsWindowVisiblebefore the change was visible at all.Whether that shares a root cause with the
chrome-headless-shellwindow reported here, I genuinely can't say — my setup launcheschrome.exe, so I never touch the browser spawn path. The only thing that looks common across the reports is a parent process with no console to inherit. #40741 described that setup, but it was closed before the recipe got tried here. If that really is the precondition, it might be why it doesn't show up when running from a normal terminal.Not asking for the decision to be revisited, just leaving the cross-link — #42155 isn't mentioned anywhere on this issue.