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Comment by geekamongus | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain or point me to a good source of info on why headless Chrome is a big deal? (Not being snarky; I really want to know).

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Now when Chrome has headless support and the same feature for Firefox is coming later this year it becomes way easier to run tests using real browsers in CI environments.

You no longer have to run X windows (or xvfb) in memory to run and test on chrome. Chrome headless will render completely on it's own.

Testing and continuous integration are already mentioned, but there's also two features that might be of interest to a lot of people.

Screenshots via --screenshot on the command line.

Dump page to pdf via --print-to-pdf

pretty much replaces http://phantomjs.org/

Advanced web scraping simplified - the ongoing war between people who want content vs. those who want to make sure only the "right" people can get their content just shifted dramatically!

Is there a good documentation on chrome's remote debugging protocol? I'm trying to implement a python wrapper[1] around the protocol, but I can't find some good docs.

[1] https://github.com/yifeikong/chrome_remote

Sorry I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that you can google as well as me (if not better) on this subject, but here goes:

https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/awesome-chrome-devtools#ch... has a buch of pointers and mentions the Python-based https://github.com/iiSeymour/chromote (235 stars) - if you've got something going, try to add your project to the list!

Also found https://github.com/minektur/chrome_remote_shell (51 stars) and https://github.com/mirumee/chromedebug (26 stars)

Makes it much easier to use in continuous integration scenarios.

For example running tests in a browser in your pull request voter.

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