51–60 of 236 posts
I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?
We automate buying things on sites like Amazon.
Besides testing, my team uses phantomjs to convert pages to PDF and also to convert javascript generated charts to images. This is sad news, I'm don't think chrome eventually will add support for.
Thanks to the maintainers for all the good work!
To me, it's always a sad occasion to see diversity diminished. Nothing against Chromium, but I hope it won't be the one browser to rule them all. It's always good to have alternatives.
Wow, I'm very impressed. At this stage it is a very wise decision to step down and to focus onto something else, rather than to hold on to a project that will eventually disappear. It takes a lot of courage to move on from a project that had to be maintained for several years and that had such a reach. We can only be thankful for all the good work that went into PhantomJS, and wish the maintainers the best of luck in…
Phantom 2 switched to QTWebKit which I'm sure was a tremendous amount of work. Probably at the end of that he was hoping things would get "easier", and it sounds like it hasn't. It's just too much work for one person and if companies aren't will to pay people to do it, I'd quit too.
Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.
It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.
They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself.
I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.
Also Firefox will get headless mode in few releases https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004
I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?
Thank you for PhantomJS! Been using it for testing, generating PDFs and screenshot.
I'm wondering, are there any examples out there for generating screenshots on headless Chrome?
Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.
The main problem for developers is that getting your company to pay for something like developer tools can be very hard and a long project. Ideally every team gets a budget and a credit card to do as they see fit, but in practice a lot of (especially bigger) companies have a whole acquisition process. It's not uncommon for the hours spent in getting a license for e.g. an editor to be far more expensive than the produ…
Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.
I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?
While we're on the topic, does anyone know where one might find scripts to scrape bank statements so you don't have to download them manually every month? (This is one thing I would find headless browsers useful for...)