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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that HC is preinstalled in the runtime?

Becauee as far as I know you can already run HC with other FaaS solutions, but having this out of the box would be really nice.

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Running Headless Chrome / Chromium is a bit of a hassle on AWS Lambda and other FAAS providers. Chrome requires some specific bindings/binaries to work. I think the Chrome guys and girls convinced their Cloud coworkers to provides these in the underlying Linux machines that run the Cloud Functions.

exactly this. The base operating system comes with the system libraries necessary to support headless chrome out of the box.

(disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud)

Any chance of also supporting Firefox?

What's to really stop other providers from doing the same thing though? :)

Nothing. It's about developer convenience, not technical possibility.

Project priorities, I guess.

It actually is easier than people think, after chrome added the ability to disable shm (which isn't available on lambda) you can statically compile it into a single binary and run it with chromedriver & capybara easily.

Unfortunately Google Cloud Functions don't natively support golang yet so for my business this is a non-starter.

I just found this

https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome/blob/master/...

Don’t know if it works. Going to try this week.

Seconded. It works great. I've been using this in a lambda web collection project for the past year. Initial load times for headless chrome can be a bit slow, but iterative uses after it has launched are pretty fast.

It works and quite well, it's been pretty much set-and-forget for me for quite some months now.

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