Stupid Question 165: What is a headless browser?

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

What is a headless browser?

On tuesday I organized another UG meetup for theSweden Pluralsight Study Group. This time we covered client side Javascript testing with QUnit, a tutorial by Joe Eames (and he is such an awesome guy, he responded ASAP to our questions on Twitter, and even gave us some tips on our Meetup site!).

Another meetup we had w Pluralsight Study Group where Aaron Skonnard and crew came and inspired us :)

During the tutorial/course even Phantom.js was demonstrated, and I heard the term headless webkit and headless browser. To be honest, I haven’t heard that term before. What is a headless browser?

Basically a headless browser is a webbrowser without the UI- so it’s faster while having the same abilities, and that is what Phantom.js is. More accurately Phantom.js describes itself as: “PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API”. A headless browser is perfect for testing pages and automated tests- which are some of the things the user group will cover in the weeks to come :)

Stupid Question 165: What is a headless browser?

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