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Headless Mode in Selenium and Browserist#

Why Headless Mode? Advantages and Disadvantages#

When you want to run an automated browser in the background while doing something else, you can gain a performance boost by running the browser in headless mode.

This is often done in combination with disabling images, 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()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")

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
edge_options.add_argument("headless")

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.add_argument("--headless")
firefox_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")

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 headless=True in the BrowserSettings class:

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from browserist import Browser, BrowserSettings, BrowserType

chrome_headless = BrowserSettings(type=BrowserType.CHROME, headless=True)
edge_headless = BrowserSettings(type=BrowserType.EDGE, headless=True)
firefox_headless = BrowserSettings(type=BrowserType.FIREFOX, headless=True)

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

Supported Browsers#

Note

Not all browsers support headless mode, for instance Safari and Internet Explorer.

Browsers that support headless mode:

Chrome Edge Firefox Safari Internet Explorer