Features
< Back to Blog Overview

Headless Testing with WebDriver

2017-08-07
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share on HackerNews

Since Chrome 60, there's an option to make Chrome run in headless mode. Headless mode means Chrome does not need to start up a User Interface (Window/GUI), it simply runs without any visualisation. This also means that the browser starts up way faster than it normally would and that it runs much faster too.


Even though running tests in a Headless browser is not the same like a user browsing your website on a normal browser, it might still make sense to use Headless Testing as a way to quickly verify certain things on your website (Smoke-test).


Today we've added support to our Selenium Grid which allows you to run headless tests on Chrome. Since there's no UI, this means there will not be any screen-recording of the test or screenshots during the test.


To run a test in Chrome headless mode, pass in "headless" : true in your desired capabilities:

Copy code
{
 "browserName" : "chrome",
 "version" : "latest",
 "platform" : "WIN10",
 "headless" : true
}

Running tests in headless mode makes tests start faster, makes them faster and uses up less minutes of your TestingBot account.


More information and documentation for headless testing is available on the headless test docs.

TestingBot Logo

Sign up for a Free Trial

Start testing your apps with TestingBot.

No credit card required.

Other Articles

blank

Three new features have been added to TestingBot: Status Badges: an image that displays whether your latest build passed or failed.

Read more
blank

Below is a list of new features we've added this past month to the TestingBot.com service: We take a video for every test you run on TestingBot....

Read more
Safari 10 Automated Testing with Apple's SafariDriver

Starting with macOS Sierra, Apple's now providing a SafariDriver that comes pre-installed with the OS. This is great news:

Read more
blank

While we continue to provide the most secure and stable Selenium grid publicly available, we recently added Two Factor Authentication (2FA) as an ...

Read more
Free Automated Testing for Open Source Projects

We love Open-Source projects at TestingBot! Some of the components powering our service are using Open-Source projects. That's why we decided to...

Read more
blank

In this article we'll show you how to set up your own Selenium Grid to run tests on various versions of Firefox. If you are new to setting up you...

Read more