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Disable Images in Selenium and Browserist#

Why Disable Images? Advantages and Disadvantages#

If you want to scrape a website that loads images, you can gain a performance boost by disabling images.

This is often done in combination with headless mode, since you can't see any graphics in a headless browser. On the other hand, the disadvantage is obviously that you can't observe what the browser is doing.

How to Configure#

Selenium#

With Selenium, each browser type has its own configuration:

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from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options as ChromeOptions

chrome_options = ChromeOptions()
preferences = {
    "profile.managed_default_content_settings.images": 2,
    "profile.default_content_settings.images": 2
}
chrome_options.add_experimental_option("prefs", preferences)

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
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from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.edge.options import Options as EdgeOptions

edge_options = EdgeOptions()
edge_options.use_chromium = True
preferences = {
    "profile.managed_default_content_settings.images": 2,
    "profile.default_content_settings.images": 2
}
edge_options.add_experimental_option("prefs", preferences)

driver = webdriver.Edge(options=edge_options)
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from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options as FirefoxOptions

firefox_options = webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
firefox_options.set_preference("permissions.default.image", 2)
firefox_options.set_preference("dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.libflashplayer.so", "false")

driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=firefox_options)

Browserist#

Or use Browserist where the configuration is the same for all browser types – less hassle as the configuration of Selenium is automatically handled in the background. Simply set disable_images=True in the BrowserSettings class:

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from browserist import Browser, BrowserSettings, BrowserType

chrome = BrowserSettings(type=BrowserType.CHROME, disable_images=True)
edge = BrowserSettings(type=BrowserType.EDGE, disable_images=True)
firefox = BrowserSettings(type=BrowserType.FIREFOX, disable_images=True)

for settings in [chrome, edge, firefox]:
    with Browser(settings) as browser:
        browser.open.url("https://example.com")
        browser.wait.seconds(5)

Supported Browsers#

Note

Not all browsers support disabling of images well: Both Safari and Internet Explorer requires us to update global settings in the operating system that may impact how these browsers behave outside Browserist.

Browsers that support disabling of images:

Chrome Edge Firefox Safari Internet Explorer