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And while people wait, you can already do a 'poor mans' headless Firefox thanks to SlimerJS and xvfb.

Phantomjs is less resource heavy if you're constantly spooling up and down lots of instances but I prefer SlimerJS w/ Firefox since it lets you keep up to date with a modern version of Firefox (rather than relying on sporadic QTWebkit updates from Phantomjs).

If you're using Casperjs, SlimerJS is virtually a drop in replacement for Phantomjs (though I worry about how long/well Casperjs will continue to be maintained).




One can use Xvfb to run normal Chrome as well (with few gotchas like --no-sandbox, --disable-gpu and dep on dbus-x11). A test I'm working on at the moment takes 28 seconds in PhantonJS and 6 in Chrome under Docker and Xvfb.


Very interesting comparison! Could you write a note on your experience somewhere?


If you need a real good alternative checkout https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf it's based on electron.


Looks very nice but I'm not using Slimer for PDF stuff.


A colleague and I spent a couple of days setting up high-fidelity webpage->PDF rendering, and by far the best results were got with SlimerJS and xvfb.


I'm actually hoping CasperJS will support headless Chrome, and headless Firefox later on too.




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