Tag: headless

Categories
Automated Acceptance Testing Automated Testing WebDriver

Real vs Headless Browsers for Automated Acceptance Tests

When I was comparing/evaluating JavaScript browser automation tools for Automattic, I noticed that a lot of the tools were headless only: either they use PhantomJS/SlimerJS or have their own headless browser engine (like Zombie.js).

I must admit I am not a fan of headless browsers for a number of reasons:

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Categories
OSX Selenium Watir Watir-WebDriver WebDriver

Watir-WebDriver with GhostDriver on OSX: headless browser testing

GhostDriver has been released which means it is now easy to run reliable headless WebDriver tests on Mac OSX.

Steps to get working on OSX

  1. First make sure you have homebrew installed
  2. Run 
    brew update

    then

    brew install phantomjs

    which should install PhantomJS 1.8.1 or newer

  3. Run irb and start using GhostDriver! 
    require 'watir-webdriver'
b = Watir::Browser.new :phantomjs
b.goto "www.google.com"
b.url #"http://www.google.com.au/"
b.title #"Google"

I’ve tested it on a large test suite (123 scenarios) and it behaves the same as other browsers with full JavaScript support. It took 8m13s in total: surprisingly it is slightly slower than ChromeDriver (7m30s) in my testing, but a little faster than the Firefox Driver (9m33s).

Well done to all involved in this project. It’s great to see a reliable, realistic headless browser with full JavaScript support for WebDriver finally released.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, it does screenshots!