What is Headless Chrome?
A headless chrome is a non-GUI version of Chrome Browser. A headless chrome is available since Chrome version 59 and, one can use it in Windows, Linux and MacOS (on Windows, it should be available since Chrome version 60+).
- Headless Chrome refers to a command-line interface to the Google Chrome web browser that can be used for various purposes, including web automation, web scraping, and testing.
- What makes it “headless” is that it runs without a graphical user interface (GUI), which means it operates in the background without displaying a browser window.
- This is in contrast to the standard Chrome browser, which has a graphical user interface and is used for manual web browsing.
- Headless Chrome provides all the functionality of a standard web browser, allowing you to interact with web pages, render and manipulate HTML and CSS, execute JavaScript, and more.
- It is often used by developers, testers, and automation engineers to perform tasks like web scrapping, automated testing, server-side rendering, and website performance analysis.
How to configure ChromeDriver to initiate Chrome browser in Headless mode through Selenium?
Selenium is one of the most widely used browser automation tools for confirming website functionality, examining website flow, confirming page titles, and fetching huge amounts of data through web scraping. An actual browser without a user interface is the same as a headless browser. Because Selenium renders pages slowly and takes up screen time, QAs frequently run into issues while automating a real browser. You may skip the entire CSS loading time since Selenium, the headless browser, loads content quicker than standard browsers. More importantly, it saves time when executing several intricate test cases with several phases. This article focuses on discussing steps to configure ChromeDriver to initiate the Chrome browser in headless mode through Selenium.