101–110 of 191 posts
Can someone do an ELI5 on why headless browsers are useful? I've use them before to make screenshots of webpages, and I have noticed that many NPM packages come (or came) with PhantomJS as a dependency, but I have no idea why one would need that.
They're a hassle-free way of getting the data. No need to worry about CORS, sessions, cookies, CSRF and other modern web stuff. Just simulate a human and you’re in.
This is very nice. What's the recommended way to run end-to-end tests in headless firefox _and_ headless chrome? Can't wait for a cross-platform headless Edge :-)
We think we'll begin work on Firefox headless soon. PRs welcome :)
Perhaps I'm spoiled, but I'm wondering why this wasn't a thing many years ago. Am I wrong in saying this was brought about in reaction to Chrome adding the same feature, or has this been there for a while? Clearly people wanted this for ages, hence the work on things like PhantomJS. But it seems like it was only added once they realized they needed to play catch-up with Chrome.
This seems way too fast to be a response to chrome
Perhaps I'm spoiled, but I'm wondering why this wasn't a thing many years ago. Am I wrong in saying this was brought about in reaction to Chrome adding the same feature, or has this been there for a while? Clearly people wanted this for ages, hence the work on things like PhantomJS. But it seems like it was only added once they realized they needed to play catch-up with Chrome.
I remember using this with xvfb to achieve headless Firefox. The rendered text could then be accessed via localhost with a text-only browser or tcp client e.g. netcat.
Can someone do an ELI5 on why headless browsers are useful? I've use them before to make screenshots of webpages, and I have noticed that many NPM packages come (or came) with PhantomJS as a dependency, but I have no idea why one would need that.
Crawling the Web. Although you might think that you can crawl a web site by poking through the HTML looking for tags and opening the URLs they contain; that stopped working well a long time ago. Modern sites are essentially complex GUI applications that run inside...a browser. You need either a browser, or some browser-equivalent thing therefore in order to run them and properly crawl them.
Can you tell Firefox to print in headless mode? I want to write reports using HTML and JS, but printing is always an issue.
If you need professional typesetting from HTML+CSS, Prince XML is still king, I'm pretty sure. It can be invoked & run heedlessly. It also supports page-oriented CSS declarations and variables, like headers, footers, page numbers, etc.
As a UI designer, I dream of strike headless strike chromeless browsers, where the UI appears when you need it, intuitively, even when NOT in full screen. The top bar simply takes too much unnecessary space. If there's any dev that wants to collaborate on this, let me know :)
From a security POV, the URL being displayed at all times is absolutely necessary in order to avoid phishing.
A full source reputation, authentication, and integrity capability strikes me as far more useful.
Does anyone have any metrics on headless vs headed browser testing? Can you say headless is 25% faster and 20% more reliable? What is the sales pitch for headless browsers for UI automation?
We are sticking with phantomjs for now because it is significantly faster than chrome for our tests.