A list of headless web browsers

Re:A list of headless web browsers by VeejayRampay on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @05:51AM (#12899193)

I really wish we had a good set of scriptable browser engines (i.e. everything but the graphics part) for all browsers. That would make testing so much easier.

Even simple tasks like taking a screenshot of a given web page involves PhantomJS, which seems really heavy-handed.

Thanks for compiling this list but the issue I'm having with this is the lack of a rating system based on usage, Github stars, downloads, repo activity, project creation, corporate support, etc. to get a measure of how reliable those tools are.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A list of headless web browsers by icebraining on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @07:12AM (#12899584)

The problem is that to take a screenshot of how the page actually looks, you need almost everything from the browser. Rendering of HTML/CSS/images/videos, Javascript execution, networking, cookies... you end up with 90% of the browser, and then removing the last 10% is not worth it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A list of headless web browsers by nattaylor on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @09:38AM (#12900545)

If all you want to do is take a screenshot, I've had success with http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ (which also outputs to image formats.) You can't script it though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A list of headless web browsers by mping on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @06:19AM (#12899313)

Yeah, some are quite old and discontinued. I currently use Nightmare which is electron based and has a nice api. Tried a couple others but every time something went wrong.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A list of headless web browsers by bzbarsky on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @09:45AM (#12900600)

The problem is that the "graphics part" is often the part that knows how to deal with fonts, which you sort of need for layout.

[ Parent | on HN ]