What is Headless Browsing?

A headless browser is a web browser without a graphical user interface (GUI). It behaves like a normal browser — can load pages, execute JavaScript, navigate between pages, and do network activity — but you don’t see anything visually. Like imagine Chrome but no button or input field or text field. You don't see a thing.

Well, if you don't actually see anything, then what is it even used for?

Even though there's no visual interface, headless browsers are incredibly useful for automating and testing web-based tasks. They're often used in:

• Web scraping
• Automated UI testing (CI/CD)
• SEO audits
• Screenshot & PDF generation
• Crawling/indexing (like how Googlebot works)
• Performance monitoring
• Web testing

Some Popular Headless Browsers & Tools are:-

• Puppeteer -> Node.js library for controlling Chrome/Chromium
• Playwright -> More modern & powerful — supports Chromium, Firefox, WebKit
• Selenium -> Classic UI testing framework, also supports headless
• Headless Chrome-> Chrome launched with --headless flag
• HtmlUnit-> Java-based, lightweight (no real JS engine, more for HTML parsing)

How Headless Browsers Work (Under the Hood)

• Starts the browser engine (e.g., Chromium) in memory.
• Loads the URL like a normal browser.
• Executes:
• HTML parsing
• CSS styling
• JavaScript (client-side logic)
• AJAX requests
• Can take screenshots, extract text, click buttons, fill forms — all programmatically.
• No display layer — so it's faster and can run in CLI environments.

Example Flow?

• Launch browser in headless mode
• Open new page
• Go to URL
• Wait for elements to appear
• Extract data / take screenshot / run tests
• Close browser

This is it for today and in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!