61–70 of 88 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Latex is free.
Really not the same thing (e.g. pandoc for html -> pdf via LaTeX) as having a webkit based renderer. They do not look the same at all; sometimes it is good to have a LaTeX output but most of the time you are going to want a more accurate representation of your HTML.
Do you need to use selenium to control Firefox in headless mode or does it have something lower level like Chrome's devtools protocol?
What are the biggest challenges when implementing headless mode? I'm asking cause this feature took some time to be delivered both in Firefox and Chrome and I always assumed that it should be 'pretty' straightforward to implement. Is it that both engines were coupled with GUI libs?
1) Theming of form controls to make them look like native widgets.
2) Clipboard.
3) Printing.
4) Fonts and font rendering.
5) General "now it's time to repaint" machinery.
This is in no way an exhaustive list. In practice what you have to do for headless is create the relevant GUI bits anyway, but not actually show them on screen, then deal with whatever quirks your GUI library has when its bits are not shown.
It's not very clear how to actually use this in a test environment like Selenium etc. At least with headless Chrome there are libraries now to drive it via the remote debug protocol like https://github.com/LucianoGanga/simple-headless-chrome This feels a little nicer than Selenium as it's one less layer of abstraction. EDIT: guess from other comments WebDriver is the right method to access.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine noob question: could you not use Xvfb?
you can, and it worked, prior to availability of headless options(Phantom sucks). However xvfb is yet another dependency that could cause breakage.
Of course headless is also needed as the PhantomJS solution is not maintained anymore since April. See discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105489
It should be pretty similar on Linux, and probably macOS when it comes around.
"headless" Poke me when there are no X11/Qt/GTK/whatever dependencies at all - that is headless. https://packages.debian.org/stretch/firefox-esr
Upvote the bug! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372998 I doubt it'll happen anytime too soon, but Mozilla should see the community interest.
Is there a linux headless mode already? Selenium chrome driver headless is pretty much useless in linux because important methods like `send_keys` need X anyway for keyboard mappings or something like that.
Genuine noob question: could you not use Xvfb?