[Feature]: Visible option for locators about playwright HOT 4 OPEN

I want to chime in that a workaround for this is to use getByRole instead of getByText, as we can exploit the fact that invisible elements do not have a role:

when visible	when hidden

Maybe the documentation can address getByText’s quirk (of also selecting visible elements) to nudge people into using getByRole more.

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Also, an interesting observation in API design: in getByText("...", { visible: true }), the visible option is trimodal! With the defaults we have, { visible: false } clearly means "only select invisible", { visible: true } means "only select visible", and { visible: undefined } means "do the default", which is selecting both visible and invisible elements.

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Update: Upon reading more on the playwright documentation, I found out the following also works:

page.getByText('Waiting for response...', { exact: true }).locator('visible=true');

But I still think if we can expose visible as an option, it will look cleaner. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Thank you.

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Hey @qk5! We've discussed this in our team sync yesterday. The fact that by default, getByText selects not just visible elements but also invisible ones is a design regret of ours. All the RTL-Style selectors (think getByText, getByAltText, getByRole) are modeled after human perception, and that means that it's surprising for it to include hidden elements. So if we could go back in time, we would change the defaults so that getByText only selects visible elements.

We can't though, and we'd prefer not to introduce breaking changes in such a fundamental part of our API. Even if we made this behaviour a config toggle, we'd be forking our userbase into two fundamentally different behaviours, which would lead to even more confusion. Really bad, especially when you consider that libraries have no way of detecting it.

Now, the visible option you propose is an interesting way out of this! Before we think about implementing it though, we'd like to understand how big this problem really is. I'll label it "P3: Collecting Feedback" and then we can collect some upvotes on the issue. Hopefully that gives us some perspective on the gravitas of this, and sleep a couple of nights about other solutions to the problem.

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