

Chrome is probably the most popular one to be compatible with headless mode.

Generally, most common browsers can run headless. It will let you do all the things a regular browser would but from a programmatic angle. That’s when a headless browser may come in handy. Moreover, when extracting data from them, your crawler might experience some hiccups that will certainly slow down the whole operation. However, they take a lot of resources when loading buttons, toolbars, icons, and other graphical user interface elements that you don’t necessarily need when using code to scrape the web. The web browsers you know and love are great for your everyday web surfing activities. To manage these websites, you need to load them using a browser, but not a regular one. Yet, this technique is not as useful when scraping dynamic sites rendered by JavaScript. Using packages to fetch a site, send requests to the server, and get back HTML content you can parse into a machine-readable format like XML, CSV, or JSON is a quick and effective way to extract data from the internet. One is by manually seeking and collecting data, and the other is by automation. There are two primary methods of accessing data from sites on the web. Feel free to use the table of contents below to skip to the parts of this guide that interest you the most. This Puppeteer tutorial is intended to help you improve your web scraping experience and expedite your data gathering work. Using Puppeteer to automate your browser when web scraping is an effective solution for your JavaScript-related issues. That’s when you need to take some actions that may require additional tools, like headless browsers. When the content you want to scrape is directly rendered by JavaScript, you can’t access it from the raw HTML code. This client-side programming language is often used in scripts and files that are injected into the HTML response of a site to be processed by the browser. Most of the web seems to be ruled by JavaScript these days. However, even when using automated tools, you might still come across some challenges while going about your web scraping endeavors. It allows you to dedicate more time and effort to other essential business duties that need your attention, rather than focusing on handpicking relevant information piece by piece. While you could resort to extracting data manually by going through your sources and copy-pasting the content that interests you onto your database, the process would be extremely time-consuming and tedious. Using the right tools for web scraping is vital in the optimization of your data research tasks. Anyone who’s been scraping the web for a while knows the critical role automation plays in it.
