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I have been using WatiN for my BDD Specflow tests. It does the job, but it is slow. I recently encountered SimpleBrowser as suggested in this article. SimpleBrowser is significantly quicker than Watin. The main disadvantage is that it does not support javascript, and hence doesnt support ajax calls.

I am looking for a headless browser that supports javascript - does such thing exist? Is it recommended over Watin?

Karan
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  • hi Karan. Have you find a suitable solution ? – dan_l Nov 09 '12 at 01:30
  • no, unfortunately I did not. I simply carried on using WatiN, but reduced the number of fine-grained integration tests. – Karan Nov 10 '12 at 12:32
  • I'm in exactly the same situation. It's a new project, we want to create acceptance tests with Specflow and browser automation but WatiN is slow. The current thinking among the team is to use SimpleBrowser as the default when we know that a test won't require any javascript support and to use WatiN when javascript is required. – Tristan Mar 03 '13 at 00:22

2 Answers2

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I realize this is an old question, but it comes up in Google when you search "Headless browser specflow".

One popular option I've been using recently is PhantomJS (http://phantomjs.org/)

There is a webdriver for selenium to control PhantomJS, and as our tests were already written with specflow/selenium, this was a good fit for us.

Hope this helps someone out.

Mitchell Lee
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    I'll second this, and also mention FluentAutomation - http://fluent.stirno.com/ - an excellent project which has phantomjs as one of its drivers. – ngm May 19 '14 at 09:56
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    FluentAutomation have native support for PhantomJS? I thought it just used selenium or waitin under the hood (with selenium providing the driver for phantom) – Mitchell Lee May 19 '14 at 20:12
  • You're right, my mistake - from the website: "FluentAutomation is implemented using one of two supported automation providers - Selenium WebDriver or WatiN. Selenium is the preferred provider and the most developed. WatiN is provided as an alternative method of automation Internet Explorer. PhantomJS support has been moved into the Selenium package as a browser target." – ngm May 20 '14 at 09:30
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I've been using Coypu, which I've found to be a nice wrapper for browser automation. Through that you can use HtmlUnit, a headless browser, which as far as I understand supports some javascript (there is in fact a Driver within Coypu call HtmlUnitWithJavascript). I haven't really tried the HtmlUnit driver as of yet but Coypu itself is very good (and I'm sure you could use HtmlUnit outside of Coypu too.)

See https://github.com/featurist/coypu#htmlunit for some ideas.

ngm
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