Running Chromium and FFmpeg in CI is a big source of runtime and potential flakiness. This epic aims to minimize the CPU/memory footprint and artifact cost of our browser and recording stack without sacrificing debuggability. The outcome: faster builds, lower ci cost/time, fewer moving parts, and a setup that is predictable and portable across Jenkins agents and other upcoming CI setup.
This epic is browser tool independent where reasonable: while our primary target is WebdriverIO on Chromium with FFmpeg, the patterns should translate to other setups too with modest tuning for FFmpeg and other tools that use Chromium (Cypress for now).
**Goals:**
* Reduce CI time attributable to browser startup, test runtime, and video/screenshot handling.
* Make video capture smarter (maybe conditional recording, lower bitrate/size by default).
* Evaluate if headless would (--headless) could be a thing instead of using XVFB for some tests (faster, lower overhead etc)
* If possible: Instrument and expose metrics (browser launch time, test CPU-seconds) into our upcoming metrics stack.
* If we make changes, document them
* It is not a goal to rewrite the current stack, the goal is to tune what we have
**Acceptance Criteria**
// TBD