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Comment by enibundo | Hacker News Reader

One problem with selenium last time I used it, was that it is very slow. Maybe this python library fixes this (i.e. no browser will show).

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Alas, this is both a downside and an upside of Selenium. It's rather slow because it does need to spin up a Firefox instance, but it is very user-friendly and easy to learn because you can see exactly where you are at just by looking at the web browser.

You can run headless Selenium, and speed it up by using a static Firefox instance, but even then it'll be maybe 2-3x slower than some of the others.

The only reason this is (in my opinion), better than other solutions is because you can see the physical webpage it's loading, and for the sheer ease of use that this has. You don't even really need any coding experience to get a simple test running.

You can record tests in Selenium or something like Capybara and replay them using something like PhantomJS, which is a headless browser-like JS execution environment that does things like generate a would-be DOM: https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara

You can also use Selenium tests with things like https://www.browserstack.com/automate , where TL;DR they run your selenium test on dozens of browser + platform combinations and send you the results, like screenshots and any javascript errors. If you're familiar with CI stuff, you can see how powerful this has the potential to be. It's non-trivial but very possible to run your own cluster of selenium nodes as well; check out the official Selenium Grid: http://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/grid/

what is CI? ...CLI?

Continuous Integration.

You can use my project https://github.com/machinepublishers/jbrowserdriver which can be both headless or (what's the opposite of headless?) have a full GUI. It runs on Java using Java's built-in browser and will take a second to warm up when an instance is created, but after doing so, you can reuse the existing browser since I added a reset() API. Performance is comparable to desktop browsers (slightly slower), and for every action it blocks until AJAX page loads finish.

Headful, I would think.

The only reason to use Selenium at all these days is because it can run your tests in multiple real browsers. If you don't need to test cross-browser support, then you can use phantomjs or one of the bazillions of other tools mentioned in this thread.

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