

PhantomJS - minimalistic headless WebKit - yakto
http://www.phantomjs.org/

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vitovito
Note: not genuinely headless. It still requires you run an X server, such as
Xvfb.

As far as I know, there's no genuine headless Webkit.

For a genuinely headless system, consider Chris Lord's "offscreen" branch of
Gecko, discussed here: [http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2010/07/29/moz-headless-
screensh...](http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2010/07/29/moz-headless-screenshot/)

I'd be interested in sponsoring someone who wanted to bring the offscreen
branch up to mainline, and Chris would be willing to mentor you in such an
effort.

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wslh
I use htmlunit for scraping, it's a headless browser although using WebKit
will be far better.

It's sad that WebKit lacks some easier integration (good COM/.NET object in
Windows).

~~~
vitovito
Crowbar is a Gecko-based scraper, if you're interested in using a real
browser: <http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Crowbar>

~~~
wslh
The issue is using Crowbar in latest Gecko versions.

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chadcf
A capybara driver for this would be fantastic...

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joshu
Can it be used to render pages? That's still something I desire.

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vitovito
The offscreen Mozilla branch I linked to above can. We use it for our private
bookmarking/archiving site. Our headless Gecko drives the thumbnails and
previews on qumbler.com.

(I originally wrote "delicious/pinboard clone" instead of
"bookmarking/archiving site" but I realized we've had it since before
del.icio.us launched.)

~~~
joshu
really? delicious was 2003; muxway, the predecessor was in 2001.

~~~
vitovito
Like I said, private site, not productized at all. :) We have web-based group
bookmarks going back to August 2002, and we have static records going back a
few years before that. We starting archiving and versioning pages in September
2002. I don't see that we had tagging until sometime in 2005.

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ubasu
Previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2142104>

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giberson
This is brilliant.

Not exactly an award winning comment, but it's literally what I thought when I
was reading the quick start and got to the rendering section.

