I think the goal is to have a browser that renders web pages and is fully interactive, but just doesn't render to screen and is interactive through an API rather than input devices.

So it's going to need a UI rendering and interaction library.

You don't actually need to have X11 etc running to use headless mode, the libraries are just necessary for linking as there aren't separate headless and non-headless Firefox binaries shipped. The possibility of dynamically loading these libraries to remove this dependency is being looked into.

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.

As minor counterpoint: Firefox is not strictly speaking developed "by Mozilla" but by the community. Mozilla's the curator, and has a fair bit of staff also working on it, but vast swathes of the codebase are community contributions. If you need FF to do a thing, and you think you have good enough ideas to contribute the solution there, then rather than upvoting a bug, or bumping it to ask what's happening, be the person to make the happening happen =)

Of course, but bug upvotes don't hurt that cause, either. I have a few reasons that I work on open source projects. First, to fix a bug or add a feature that affects me directly. Second, to learn something new. If I'm just doing the latter, I'd prefer to tackle a bug with more interest/votes, to help others out while I'm at it and increase the odds of finding a willing reviewer.

If your running this on a server sure great. On desktop that is next to pointless due to the need for those dependencies for everything besides cure apps.

>If your running this on a server sure great.

Which is certainly the obvious primary use case for headless browsers.

I actually have to run it on my desktop due to non-primary use cases.

This got down voted a lot but GTK is really a pretty painful dependency in many situations (especially gtk3)

Not that Firefox itself is particularly lightweight.

Why?

Well - you will get downvotes for making a technical claim, but not explaining the reason...