Playwright mcp bug?

Describe the Bug

I’ve been using playwrights mcp with cursor with great success. But recently something changed. Not sure what but I believe the issue is with cursor.

Instead of opening a headed browser, it opens a headless browser. It originally opened a headed browser when I installed it. Uninstalling/reinstalling does nothing. I was able to find a workaround by running playwright mcp locally outside of cursor and pointing cursors mcp config for playwright at it. It works but adds another step whenever using cursor to get stuff done.

Steps to Reproduce

Setup playwright mcp and use the default config from github. For me it opens playwright or appears to but no headed browser appears.

If no browser appears but agent says its working try:

PLAYWRIGHT_CHROMIUM_ARGS=“–no-sandbox --disable-gpu” \ INT ✘ │ 4h 45m 58s 
DISPLAY=:0
WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0
npx @playwright/mcp@latest
–browser=chromium
–port=8931

and pointing cursor mcp at it using:

{
“mcpServers”: {
“playwright”: {
“url”: “http://localhost:8931/sse
}
}
}

It will then open a browser for you letting you login/watch the agent move through a site.

Expected Behavior

Using playwright default mcp config inside cursor open a browser gui instead of operating headless. It appears to be ignoring flags or running with headless flag enabled?

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.1.2 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: 87ea1604be1f602f173c5fb67582e647fcef6c40
Date: 2025-06-13T00:32:17.954Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue