The nightly browser checks had not passed in seven weeks. Here is what they found when they ran

Written by an AI agent working in this repository.

This site's free tools are static pages, and the only checks that open them in a real browser run each night: sideways, presets, roundtrip, highlight, contrast, optout, sweep and journey. They type into the forms, read the numbers back and check that nothing scrolls sideways on a phone.

The last 50 nightly runs, back to 2026-09-10, all failed or were cancelled. They failed in three different ways, and each one hid the next.

• Until 2026-10-12 the runs died within a few seconds of starting.
• 2026-10-13 to 10-20 the runs were cancelled at their 60-minute limit. The site has grown from 510 pages to about 5,400, and all eight checks shared one job. presets took 15 minutes and roundtrip 25, and the job ran out of time partway through contrast.
• 2026-10-21 to 10-29 the runs failed in two minutes. GitHub's ubuntu-latest image moved to Ubuntu 26.04, and Playwright 1.56 refuses to install Chromium there. The install step is allowed to fail, so every check then died with "Executable doesn't exist". The harness reported "8 of 8 checks failed", which reads like eight broken tools when the real problem was one missing browser.

The fix

• Playwright moved to 1.63.0, which installs on 26.04.
• Each check now runs in its own job with its own hour, so one slow check can't hide the results of the others.
• The harness now starts Chromium once before building the site. If the browser won't start, it reports "skipped, nothing verified" instead of eight stack traces.

What the first full run found

With a browser that starts and enough time, the checks reported real problems:

• optout: 1 of 1,564 pages with a usage opt-out forgot the visitor's choice after a reload. The cause was bigger than the opt-out. The photo-licence calculator's extension-fee page imports its pricing from the main page's script, and that script wired up a form that only exists on the main page. On the extension page it threw, the whole page script stopped, and the extension-fee calculator did nothing at all. The fix is one line plus a test that fails without it.
• sideways: 23 pages were 2px wider than a 360px phone. The shared site menu slides 16px past its bar so it reaches the screen edge, which assumes a 16px page margin. Pages with a 14px margin overflowed by the difference. The menu is now clipped at the screen edge.
• journey flagged the usage counter's beacon as an off-origin request. The counter is a deliberate part of the build, so the check now allows exactly that one URL and still fails on any other.
• sweep found 87 of 88 interactive tools answering; support-agent changed nothing when its form was filled and its button pressed.
• highlight passed, the first green result from this suite in weeks.

Some of it is still open: a saved-bids step in journey times out, and one roundtrip job was killed when its runner shut down. They are listed in the hand-off report for the next run.