In this post, we share our fascination with Headless Browsers and recommend a suitable development library for your project. It might come in handy if you work in data science, website development and testing, SEO, and UX/UI design.
The cornerstone of any website’s security measures is the ability to tell a human and a bot apart. Once a bot has been identified, its IP address is flagged and blocked. One way to recognize bots is to compare bot and human behavioral patterns. Even with advanced randomizers, bots cannot fully imitate humans’ natural imperfection and chaotic timing.
One common way of filtering bots out is a “honeypot” link. It is a security mechanism that creates a virtual trap to lure attackers. It is usually an invisible link requesting an activity – people can’t see it and, hence, don’t click it, while bots programmed to act on any human activity, do. Once bots click such link, they are flagged and banned. One other is CAPTCHA: modern AI can tick checkboxes and recognize text, but the precise execution and repetition expose them as “inhuman.”
Headless browsers get past the “human or bot” challenge by emulating human actions. They are used for automated website and web app browsing and interaction.
Headless browsers render web pages or app code into an interactive page a human normally sees. Headless browsers scroll websites, click buttons, download files, and solve JavaScript elements, so we no longer need to do it manually. They can type data into fields, complete forms, search, or go through a shopping workflow from beginning to end.
How are headless browsers different from regular browsers? Technologically, headless browsers are not much different from our “normal” Chrome or Firefox, except they do not have a human-facing User Interface (tabs, URL, etc.) and have added AI and automation features instead. You control headless browsers by writing scripts with instructions.
Any task that involves long hours of scrolling and clicking through websites can benefit from automation. If it involves modern, dynamic websites, a headless browser might be necessary.
You do not need a headless browser if the websites you are scrolling are plain HTML/CSS pages, which are still very common. In that case, an HTML Web Scraper will be a simpler yet sufficient solution.
You need headless browser capability when dealing with dynamic pages, stateful code elements, and JavaScript controls. These website features make user experience more personalized, but, as a side effect, they interfere with the bots’ ability to do their “job.”
Headless browsers help to bypass Browser Fingerprinting, one of the anti-bot measures. Instead of relying just on IP address, Browser Fingerprinting looks at the entire combination of the timezone, device, screen resolution, JavaScript configuration, etc.
UI testing is one of the first headless browser use cases. Performing multiple user interaction scenarios repeatedly and under different conditions can be daunting. Human imprecision can also contaminate some technical experiments and require many resources to load pressure-test. Headless browsers have to expose bugs and errors.
Using headless browsers, analysts can accumulate samples to compare different UI versions faster. Gathering data from human users can take weeks. Analysts can then compare and correct inefficient or unproductive workflows.
Sometimes we need to capture website screenshots en masse for design analysis or aggregator previews. Most headless browser tools are well-capable of taking page screenshots and saving them as PDFs.
Headless browser functionality is now available for most major languages and browsers.
The most popular headless browser libraries are:
Important note: for testing and scraping headless, Proxy might be essential. Even advanced bots will be detected from time to time. You need to protect your own IP address from getting blocked. Similarly, you need a geo-enabled Proxy service to test geo-sensitive workflows or scrape geo-blocked information.
Headless browsers automate browsing whenever it might be required. Same as any automation, it is a smart effort and time-saving tool. No head – no headache!
Choose a headless browser application or library that uses your programming language and the type of browser you need. Open-source Selenium, Puppeteer by Google, and Playwright by Microsoft are the most advanced headless browser libraries.