You can sometimes just fetch data from the same internal API endpoints that a JavaScript app is using but it’s becoming increasingly popular to put measures in place that prevent that. In the web scraping world, headless browsers are particularly useful when dealing with JavaScript heavy sites.

This has huge repercussions for both automated testing and web scraping. If someone wants to continue - feel free to reach me.įrom this alone, it’s pretty clear that headless Chrome is going to play an increasingly important role in the headless browser space (and headless Firefox as well, now that it’s been released). We have no support.įrom now, I am stepping down as maintainer. Developing PhantomJS 2 and 2.5 as a single developer is a bloody hell.Įven with recently released 2.5 Beta version with new and shiny QtWebKit, I can’t physically support all 3 platforms at once (I even bought the Mac for that!). I don’t see any future in developing PhantomJS. Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. I think people will switch to it, eventually. Vitaly Slobodin, the former maintainer of PhantomJS, had this to say after hearing the news. To put this into context: PhantomJS, one of the current leaders in the space, has over 21k stars on GitHub and is used by companies such as Netflix and Twitter for both unit and performance testing. This may not sound earth-shattering if you don’t deal with headless browsers very often but it’s actually a pretty big deal. With versions 59 and onwards, it will now be possible to harness the power of V8, Blink, and the rest of Chrome in a non-graphical server environment.

Over the last two years or so it had started looking more and more like this functionality would eventually make it into the public releases and, as of this week, that has finally happened. It has long been rumored that Google uses a headless variant of Chrome for their web crawls. NOTE: Be sure to check out Running Selenium with Headless Chrome in Ruby if you’re interested in using Selenium in Ruby instead of Python. If you’re looking for instructions then skip ahead to see Setup Instructions. UPDATE: This article is updated regularly to reflect the latest information and versions.

Install selenium ide in chrome