Can someone do an ELI5 on why headless browsers are useful?
I've use them before to make screenshots of webpages, and I have noticed that many NPM packages come (or came) with PhantomJS as a dependency, but I have no idea why one would need that.
I've use them before to make screenshots of webpages, and I have noticed that many NPM packages come (or came) with PhantomJS as a dependency, but I have no idea why one would need that.
You spin up a copy of your server, point the headless browser at it, run some JavaScript to simulate some user interactions, and verify the page contains the right strings / screenshot doesn't deviate too much from a golden image.
I guess the ELI5 way of saying that would be: "Making sure your website still works."
People also headless browsers for content generation inside larger systems. (I saw one team make videos by creating CSS animations, and then capturing screenshots from the headless browser at 30 fps.)
Thanks!
Putting the website through user actions in a firefox browser and recording/capturing/documenting the results headlessly. Headless version allows you to go through hundreds of results in the background.
Crawling the Web. Although you might think that you can crawl a web site by poking through the HTML looking for <a> tags and opening the URLs they contain; that stopped working well a long time ago. Modern sites are essentially complex GUI applications that run inside...a browser. You need either a browser, or some browser-equivalent thing therefore in order to run them and properly crawl them.
They're a hassle-free way of getting the data. No need to worry about CORS, sessions, cookies, CSRF and other modern web stuff. Just simulate a human and you’re in.