Headless Testing with WebDriver

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:

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.