Comments on: Headless Testing Awesomeness: Pros and Cons (2024 Guide)

By: Mark Collins

Mark Collins — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 12:15:58 +0000

Headless chrome helped us a lot in rendering heavy sites built with a lot of javascript on ReactJS & Angular. We when we needed parallel rendering 20-30 sites per minute. Yes, you can create 20-30 chrome instances, but you should control memory, chrome is too greedy to have it near your main application. Last month we tried https://browsercloud.io, it works like a browser pool that manages our puppeteer/playwright tasks queue with load balancing between several Chromes inside. You have one connection endpoint in your app without ports rotating

By: Haden J-Robbins

Haden J-Robbins — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 11:53:31 +0000

PhantomJS was a pain when it was being maintained (not behaving like a real browser would in response to some Selenium tests) and now it is not being maintained any more is likely to be best avoided completely.
See http://phantomjs.org/

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 13:13:43 +0000

Re. Performance increases.

I am really interested in headless testing, but am wondering about the real gains in performance.

If I have a single page application that makes lots of client side API calls, rather than a server side generated HTML page, is the test still 1.5 to 2 times faster, or are we simply talking about browser interaction and rendering?

If my test bottleneck is API requests, then I assume headless does not address this?

By: Joe Colantonio

Joe Colantonio — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 12:31:39 +0000

In reply to Andrii. True I think since real users user a real browser not a headless on if you just rely on headless browser for your verification test you could miss UI bugs

By: Ignacio

Ignacio — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 15:41:25 +0000

For me, headles browser (PhantomJS) is taking longer than Chrome to execute test cases.

Html, JavaScript, images and CSS still has to be loaded by a headless browser.

By: Andrii

Andrii — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:49:37 +0000

Thank for the info Joe,
But what about negative experience of using headless browser in testing?

By: Joe Colantonio

Joe Colantonio — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 17:04:42 +0000

In reply to Karl Hentschel. HAHA - thanks Karl for pointing out the typo :) I'm a terrible speller

By: Karl Hentschel

Karl Hentschel — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 16:56:04 +0000

“Although PhantomJs in itself is not a test framework, it’s a really good cannery in a coal mine…”

The phrase is “canary in a coal mine”. A small bird taken into underground mines (especially coal mines) as an early warning for noxious and deadly gasses.

Cannery is a place where stuff is put in cans.

By: Ian walker

Ian walker — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:40:34 +0000

Thanks for this true differences.