

PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release - Allstar
https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/12897

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untog
Great news! I use PhantomJS, and I'm going to use this Hacker News thread as a
really thinly veiled attempt at advertising my startup!

We use PhantomJS as a headless browser, sometimes taking screenshots. I know,
crazy. Anyway: [http://www.mystartup.com](http://www.mystartup.com)

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seanp2k2
Changelog:
[https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/0352ddb502be9cb53cdb...](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/0352ddb502be9cb53cdb173fd7d97e3764e0c222/ChangeLog)

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jwklemm
Very nice! I've been using PhantomJS 2.0 for a while now at my automated
browser testing startup:
[https://ghostinspector.com/](https://ghostinspector.com/) (It's been
available to build from source for a couple months.)

It has a few lingering bugs (for instance, some issues with file uploads), but
overall, it's a nice improvement over 1.9.x. The JavaScript engine is much
newer and the rendering is improved.

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edwinnathaniel
Excellent news.

We, AppNeta, use PhantomJS to perform Synthetic web-app monitoring

[http://www.appneta.com/products/appview/](http://www.appneta.com/products/appview/)

While PhantomJS has some limitation here and there, it is the _only_ headless
browser our there AFAIK.

Disclaimer: I work for AppNeta (specifically for the AppView product).

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mofle
Happy to see this! We use PhantomJS in our CLI tool Pageres, but the fact that
the bundled WebKit engine in PhantomJS 1.x is ancient has caused a lot of
headake for us and our users.

[https://github.com/sindresorhus/pageres](https://github.com/sindresorhus/pageres)

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josephmecham
Excellent! I have used PhantomJS for web scraping but as that is always a gray
area of legality. I'd love to hear any other major uses you've seen it used
for. I always love it when I find that a tool I'm using can be used for other
purposes.

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pothibo
I once wanted to do automated testing with it. But because PhantomJS used an
old webkit version, I couldn't :(

But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other
headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to
work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an
utopia.

~~~
serve_yay
Yes, my team ran directly into the old webkit version issue as well. Does this
2.0 still use an old WebKit? Having trouble finding out...

Edit: it appears to be WebKit 538.1, from May 2014. But this is based on a
readme which is pretty old, so it could be outdated info

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pothibo
It uses a new version of Webkit(That includes DOM Mutation Events IIRC). But I
believe that they always ship with their own version of webkit, which will
always be behind.

For PhantomJS 2.0, I think they ship with a version of webkit that is > 6
months old.

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warfangle
They don't ship with their own version of webkit; they use qtwebkit (or at
least used to?).

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freshyill
The current release has no (very very limited?) flexbox support, making
PhantomJS less and less useful for working with modern layouts. I'm very
excited about this release.

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Ronsenshi
That's great. Couple of things that I had to battle with in the past should be
fixed in 2.0, so - awesome news.

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kyledrake
PhantomJS is amazing. We use it to take screenshots of web sites on Neocities:
[https://neocities.org/browse](https://neocities.org/browse)

~~~
chedigitz
Same here! It's saved us a tremendous amount of time for screenshots,
especially when dealing with different sized viewports. Happy to see CSS3 is
supported in 2.0 :)

A big thanks to PhantomJS devs!

