Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#141

Post by ntaylor » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #136

What is the use case for headless Chrome?

> Headless mode allows running Chromium in a headless/server environment. Expected use cases include loading web pages, extracting metadata (e.g., the DOM) and generating bitmaps from page contents -- using all the modern web platform features provided by Chromium and Blink.

Practically speaking, software developers will use headless Chrome to automate testing of product functionality. Today, developers use systems like Selenium or PhantomJS to accomplish this feat, but it's a painful process to maintain these headless browser execution engines. Adding headless support into Chrome means that developers can count on the presentation of their application on a given version of the Blink engine run within Chrome.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#142

Post by brendandahl » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

For those interested, Firefox is also going to support a headless mode. The current nightly supports headless SlimerJS on Linux and more platforms will come soon.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#143

Post by hackcasual » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

Looks like the launch bug is private? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=705916

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#144

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

shouldbworking wrote: post #82

paulirish wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (Chrome) have reached out to PhantomJS to inquire if they're interested in collaborating: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs-dev/S-mEBwuSgKQ/tU... The DevTools Protocol is the primary API for headless Chrome, but we are excited for higher-level abstractions like PhantomJS & NightmareJS's API to manipulate the browser as well. Plenty of details to work out, but hopefully sometime this year you'll get a drop-…

It was my understanding that Google's crawler literally is Chrome. Does Google have any plans to open source those parts of the browser to make integration easier? Maybe I was mistaken

That seems unlikely... It would seem they have two sets of crawlers... one that does typical/advanced scraping, and another that runs the JS (Chromium) and takes DOM snapshots. This is reflected by changing certain properties (window title etc) and seeing them reflected in Google's search results. A couple years ago, the lag was several days to a week behind on new content via as-rendered from the server vs. via JS.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#145

Post by tianlins » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

How fast is headless vs. normal? According to

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/c...

the chrome browser spends a decent amount of time on other steps such as parsing HTML. I wonder how much time could be saved by not rendering pages into pixels.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#146

Post by bluepnume » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

akras14 wrote: post #108

bluepnume wrote: post #10

This is fantastic. I'm using a combination of Chrome and PhantomJS for karma testing right now, for https://github.com/paypal/paypal-checkout and https://github.com/krakenjs/xcomponent . There are hundreds of tests opening up hundreds of iframes and popup windows, and sending a lot of cross-window messages, and that ends up being really memory hungry. Chrome deals pretty well with garbage collection, so long as I'm c…

I replied to you on Twitter, but for the sake of discussion, there is a third option that may be worth exploring - using Chrome running in virtualized Windows Manager - https://www.alexkras.com/running-chrome-and-other-browsers-i...

Very cool. Gonna have to check this out.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#147

Post by zigomir » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:09 PM UTC

Not sure if this can enable SSR (server side rendering) for any client side lib?

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#148

Post by Naracion » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

yamaneko wrote: post #130

2T1Qka0rEiPr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few hours later: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phantomjs/9aI5d-LDuN...

After his announcement, Vitaly answered to the team: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs-dev/S-mEBwuSgKQ/PQ... > >Is there interest on your side in adopting Chromium as a runtime? There's some existing documentation [2] around the API and embedding, but admittedly, this would be some work. > We are interested. But I am afraid not in the current state. Currently, PhantomJS heavily relies on Qt and QtWebKit. It's…

Also see https://github.com/Vitallium/phantomium

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#149

Post by ryeguy » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:29 PM UTC

JepZ wrote: post #48

arrowgunz wrote: post #15

What does this mean for Electron and other apps that depend on Electron?

I am looking forward to cli tools powered by electron. Imagine the beauty of a grep writting in js, executed by a chrome binary. :D

Imagine the terrible performance of grep written in js, executed by a chrome binary.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#150

Post by zwerdlds » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 8:16 PM UTC

zwerdlds wrote: post #3

masterleep wrote: post #2

Please let this be capable of generating PDFs from HTML from the command line.

FWIW, you can do that now, using phantomjs (which is chrome) http://phantomjs.org/screen-capture.html

Tough crowd.