I feel the same. No failure here. It served its purpose very well, while it was needed. It’s retiring while it’s still better than it’s replacement in a few areas...like proxy support.

This is the main blocker for me right now for sure.

I really hope Microsoft offers a headless IE / Edge at some point. It would be amazing to be able to use all 3 major browsers like this. Heck, get Safari in there too (though I feel like it should be doable with WebKit already).

Huh? They have had the WebBrowser ActiveX control since IE3 I think. That works as headless as you get on Windows.

Not quite. It's my understanding it's not as up to date or equivalent to the latest IE. When I tried looking around I just got a lot of confusing information about the control, how it applies (or doesn't) traditional IE hacks, etc.

Though I could be wrong but it didn't seem like an equivalent to headless chrome or firefox.

That is not correct, it just runs in compatibility mode by default, see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patricka/2015/01/12/control...

they have webdriver support. Is that enough? I'm not sure what's the difference between headless and webdriver (if any) https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/23/bringing-auto...

Running Edge with webdriver still includes the GUI.

Agree 100%. Headless & programmable browsing is a hard nut to crack. PhantomJs paved the way.

Sadly, Chrome won't support extensions: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=706008

but... i think you can attach it to an existing chrome with remote debugging enabled, so not that big a deal!

Sure can, I've done it with puppeteer. Just can't enable headless.

The main advantage of PhantomJS at this point is the way it's built and distributed as a single binary, unlike Chrome. Much easier to maintain.

Correction: much easier to maintain irresponsibly. That binary you just downloaded and stuck somewhere some time ago - when was the last time it was updated? What about all of its underlying bundled static libraries? How certain were you ever of their up-to-dateness? Did you ever check what version of zlib it was using?

Distributions attempting to package phantomjs properly had one hell of a time trying to reproduce its builds reliably. Most gave up.

Distribution from author as binaries is a whole bundle of fail from the get-go.

Does headless chrome do PDF generation? That's the only thing I'm using phantom for at the moment.

Yes.

In fact, there's a command line switch for it https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...

The Chrome team also make Puppeteer, a node's library for interfacing with headless chrome, and has methods for making PDFs as well https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

First result:

--print-to-pdf

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...

Yes.

It's really easy to do using [puppeteer](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer). The 2nd or 3rd example is PDF.

I just recently switched from using PhantomJS to pupeteer for PDF generation in a production application. Works like a charm and has a very clean API.

Thanks that looks like a very clean library. Will switch to this.