Is there a way to throttle the network in Playwright?

Yes, there is a way to throttle the network in Playwright. In fact, Playwright provides a way to emulate various network conditions using the browserContext.route() method. You can intercept network requests and use this to emulate slow network conditions, or throttle the network.

Here is how you could do it:

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext();

  // Register a route that slows down network requests.
  await context.route('**', (route, request) => {
    // Slow down network request by 2000 milliseconds.
    setTimeout(() => {
      route.continue();
    }, 2000);
  });

  const page = await context.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  // ...
  await browser.close();
})();

In the above JavaScript example, we're using the route() method to intercept all network requests (as specified by '**'). For each intercepted request, we delay its continuation by 2000 milliseconds (2 seconds), effectively simulating a slow network connection.

Please note that Playwright doesn't provide built-in functionality to simulate different network speed like Chrome DevTools. But you can achieve similar effect by manually controlling how and when network requests are handled.

Also, keep in mind that this type of network throttling operates at the application level and doesn't accurately simulate network conditions at the system level. For more accurate simulation of network conditions, you might need to use network conditioning tools provided by the operating system.