One of the biggest reasons for using headless browser or headless browser testing is that it let’s you run the tests more quickly and in a real environment. Headless browsers are designed for tasks like automation testing, javascript library testing, javascript simulation and interactions. Since GUI is not available in the browser with headless mode, we need to use the command line to interact with the browser.
It has got all the capabilities of rendering a website, like a normal website. What is a Headless Browser ?Ī headless browser is simply a browser without the GUI.
Isn’t this evolution of browsers heading towards a smarter web development process? So in this blog we will have an overview on headless browsers and understand how it helps in smarter and faster website development.
Popular browsers like Chrome can even help in debugging the web pages in real time, analyse performance, notify the memory consumption, enable tweaking of the code and analyse performance in real time etc. Moreover, studies have proved that the headless browsers generate more traffic than the non-automated ones. Headless browsers can perform end to end testing, smoke testing etc at a faster speed as it is free from overhead of the memory space required for the UI. You can even scrape websites in headless browsers using packages like Puppeteer and nodejs.Įfficient web development hugely relies on a testing mechanism for quality assessment before we can push them in production environments. Nowadays, you can find headless browsers, where users can interact with the browser without GUI. With a significant surge in the web development area, the browsers have also become smarter.
Websites have become smarter and so have the underlying tools and frameworks. Web development has grown at a tremendous pace with lots of automation testing frameworks coming in for both frontend and backend development. Websites being the primary source of communication in the digital transformation world, have evolved humongously since the last decade.