We have covered what it is in our blog post, but to quickly answer is Puppeteer better than selenium – if you need a lightweight and fast headless browser for web scraping, Google Puppeteer would be the better choice. Perhaps the most widely known solution is Selenium. There are several solutions to control headless browsers. Controlling the browsers programmatically Now that we know what a headless browser is, it’s time to understand the available options to control the browsers programmatically. In addition to Chrome, many other browsers are based on Chromium, for example, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, etc. Chrome and is built over Chromium by adding many features. Note that Chromium and Chrome are two different browsers. In this Puppeteer tutorial, we will be focusing on Chromium.Ĭhromium is an open-source web browser made by Google. There are few more browsers with headless mode supported, for example, Splash, Chromium, etc. The most commonly used browsers, Chrome and Firefox, support headless mode. Everything is controlled programmatically. Headless browsers have complete functionality offered by a browser while being faster and taking up a lot less memory because there is no user interface. What is a headless browser?Ī headless browser is simply a browser but without a graphical user interface. Fortunately, there are better solutions – headless browsers. These UI elements are not needed when everything is being controlled with code. Unfortunately, loading a browser would take a lot of resources because it has to load a lot of other things like the toolbar and buttons. The easiest way to manage these sites is to open a browser and load the site. The biggest is that it cannot handle dynamic sites – sites that are rendered using JavaScript. Though this is a fast method, it has its limitations.

We covered this process in-depth in our JavaScript web scraping tutorial. This can then be parsed using packages like Cheerio. It directly sends a get request to the web page and receives HTML content. The first method uses packages e.g., Axios. Generally, there are two methods of accessing and parsing web pages. There are a few methods to accessing and parsing web pages, but in this tutorial we will be covering how to do it with Google Puppeteer.

Web scraping and automation with JavaScript has evolved a lot in recent years.

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