you need not use PhantomJS as an alternative to Selenium. Selenium includes a PhantomJS webdriver class, which rides on the GhostDriver platform. Simply install the PhantomJS binary to your machine. in python, you can then use: from selenium import webdriver dr = webdriver.PhantomJS() and voila.
I use webkit as a headless browser in Python via pyqt / pyside: http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/download http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/Category:LanguageBindings::PySide::Downloads I particularly like webkit because it is simple to setup. For Ubuntu you just use: sudo apt-get install python-qt4 Here is an example script: http://webscraping.com/blog/Scraping-JavaScript-webpages-with-webkit/
There had been a lot of discussion going around about the unpredictable CPU and Memory Consumption by Chrome Headless sessions. As per the discussion Building headless for minimum cpu+mem usage the CPU + Memory usage can be optimized by: Using either a custom proxy or C++ ProtocolHandlers you could return stub 1×1 pixel images or … Read more
Here are a list of headless browsers that I know about: HtmlUnit – Java. Custom browser engine. Limited JavaScript support/DOM emulated. Open source. Ghost – Python only. WebKit-based. Full JavaScript support. Open source. Twill – Python/command line. Custom browser engine. No JavaScript. Open source. PhantomJS – Command line/all platforms. WebKit-based. Full JavaScript support. Open source. … Read more