A headless browser is a browser simulation program that does not have a user interface (UI less).
Headless browser programs operate like any other browser, but do not display any UI. Selenium executes its' tests in the background.
While there are several such headless browsers available in the market, the following are the most popular ones:
Executing the web applications' UI tests without opening a browser’s user interface is called headless browser testing. The Headless browser acts similarly to a normal web browser. Testers have full control over the web pages loaded into the headless browsers. The Only difference is you will not see a graphical user interface.
We can use headless testing once the cross-browser testing is completed and want to run regression test cases in subsequent releases and with continuous integration.
You have no option other than using headless testing when your machine does not have a GUI, for instance, if you want to run your tests in Unix.
It is recommended to use the headless browser when tests are executed in parallel as User Interface based browsers consume a lot of Memory/resources. So headless browsers can be used for server-side performance testing too.
When developers push new functionality code into QA, we should be able to test the smoke tests as quickly as possible because if any show stopper is there, then we can revert the development code.
We can automate the headless browser in selenium; only automation can be performed on the headless browser
For users, there is no such thing called as a Headless or UI less browser as their eyes cannot see the UI less browser. In this headless browser, we can execute the tests created on UI browsers, so debugging occurs on UI browsers only.
Below are the browsers we are going to automate in this selenium tutorial:
Chrome 59+ versions support headless Chrome; Chrome 59+ versions combine all the latest features available in Chromium and Blink rendering engine.
With Selenium, we can achieve a headless chrome browser by using
Steps to Create headless Chrome :
1. Set the path of the Chrome driver server path using System.setProperty
2. Create object for ChromeOptions which is present under
3. Call a method called setHeadless from the ChromeOptions class object, pass the parameter as true. This method makes chrome lose the UI so that the user will have a Headless chrome browser.
// set chrome as Headless
options.setHeadless(true);We can also use the addArguments method present in the Chrome options object to create a headless chrome browser; we need to pass --headless as a parameter to create UI less chrome.
options.addArguments("--headless");
4. Now create the Object for ChromeDriver but do not forget to pass the option to the constructor of the ChromeDriver class
Using Options classes, we can set the required features for a browser ( Firefox, Chrome). The below program tries to navigate to Google and fetches the title, URL, webelement.
Complete program for running the chrome headless.
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;
public class HeadlessChromeTesting
{
public static void main(String[] args) {
//set the driver server exe path
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:/Users/user/Pictures/chromedriver.exe");
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
// set chrome as Headless
options.setHeadless(true);
//Instantiate Chrome Driver
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get("https://www.google.com");
// get the title of the page
System.out.println("Page title is - " + driver.getTitle());
// get the title of the url
System.out.println("Current Url : "+ driver.getCurrentUrl());
// find the element
driver.findElement(By.name("q")).getSize();
// close the browser
driver.close();
}
}The output of the Headless Chrome browser
Headless chrome is not working in Chrome 65 with Chromedriver 2.29 in selenium webdriver. If we try to execute in the headless chrome browser, we will get the below error message.
This WebDriverException occurs when you want to use operations like Sendkeys and Clear a field.
Updating Chrome and chromedriver.exe will solve the below Error
Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: call function result missing 'value'
(Session info: headless chrome=65.0.3325.181)
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.33.506120 (e3e53437346286c0bc2d2dc9aa4915ba81d9023f),platform=Windows NT 6.1.7601 SP1 x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)
Command duration or timeout: 0 millisecondsWe can also make Firefox a headless browser in selenium Webdriver; for firefox also have to use the setHeadless method to make the Firefox headless, but this time, the setHeadless from the FirefoxOptions class.
public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
//set the driver server exe path
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "C:/Users/user/Pictures/geckodriver.exe");
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
options.setHeadless(true);
//Instantiate Web Driver
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);
driver.get("https://www.google.com");
// get the title of the page
System.out.println("Page title is - " + driver.getTitle());
// get the title of the url
System.out.println("Current Url : "+ driver.getCurrentUrl());
// find the element
driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
// close the browser
driver.close();
}The output of Headless Firefox :
How to handle browser windows using selenium webdriver
HtmlUnitDriver is the built-in headless browser in selenium webdriver, HtmlUnitDriver is present in org.openqa.selenium.htmlunit package
Unlike Headless Firefox, Chrome, With HtmlUnitDriver, we just need to create an object for that class to create a headless browser. HTMLUnit is completely developed using java.
public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
// create instance for the HtmlUnitWebDriver
HtmlUnitDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver();
driver.get("https://www.google.com");
// get the title of the page
System.out.println("Page title is - " + driver.getTitle());
// get the title of the url
System.out.println("Current Url : "+ driver.getCurrentUrl());
// find the element
driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
// close the browser
driver.close();
}The output of the HtmlUnitDriver browser
Below was a comment by the developer of PhantomJS browser so that I will be skipping PhantomJS browser execution
I think people will switch to it (Google Chrome), eventually.
Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS.
And it doesn’t eat memory like crazy.
I don’t see any future in developing PhantomJS.
Developing PhantomJS 2 and 2.5 as a single developer is a bloody hell.
Even with recently released 2.5 Beta version with new and shiny QtWebKit,
I can’t physically support all 3 platforms at once
(I even bought the Mac for that!).
We have no support.�?
Vitaly Slobodin, the former maintainer of PhantomJS
A headless browser is faster than the UI browser, but still, I wanted to test Which UI less browser is faster than others UI less browsers
Let's execute the above-created test case in headless Chrome, Headless Firefox, and HtmlUnit browser to compare the speed of execution
Even though Headless Chrome and Headless Firefox are faster, but from the above image the We can conclude that the HtmlUnit browser beats UI less chrome and UI less Firefox in terms of speed of execution.
I am Pavankumar, Having 8.5 years of experience currently working in Video/Live Analytics project.