Tag Archives: chrome

Using DevTools Features Without Opening DevTools using Puppeteer

Keeping a feature of the Chrome Devtools – such as the FPS Meter – running with the DevTools closed unfortunately is not possible (yet?). Kayce Basques provides us with a little workaround though: You can hack together a Puppeteer script that launches Chromium, opens a remote debugging client, then turns on the DevTools feature that […]

CSS Paint API (Houdini’s Paint Worklet) available in Chrome 65!

Oh yeah, the CSS Paint API will be enabled by default in Chrome 65: CSS Paint API allows you to programmatically generate an image whenever a CSS property expects an image. Properties like background-image or border-image are usually used with url() to load an image file or with CSS built-in functions like linear-gradient(). Instead of […]

End-to-end Tests that Don’t Suck with Puppeteer

Good introduction to using Puppeteer for your e2e tests: One of the most popular tools for e2e testing is Selenium, which is a tool for automating web browsers. Selenium sounds cool in theory: write one set of tests that run on all browsers and devices, woohoo! Jk. In practice, Selenium tests are slow, brittle, and […]

Browsershot: Convert a webpage to an image or PDF using headless Chrome

The folks over at Spatie have just release Browsershot v3: Browsershot is a PHP package which can convert a webpage to an image or pdf. The conversion is done behind the scenes by Puppeteer which controls a headless version of Google Chrome. Conversion is easy-peasy, hence this example: use Spatie\Browsershot\Browsershot; // an image will be […]

Chrome DevTools: Better JavaScript logging with the Log Management UI

Great explanation by Umar Hansa on the upcoming Log Management UI in the Chrome DevTools: The new Log Management UI is an experimental feature in Canary DevTools. Once enabled, you can create console.log functions which have their own context. One can create new logging contexts using console.context(name): const thirdPartyLogger = console.context(‘3rd Party’); const infoLogger = […]

Puppeteer – Headless Chrome Node API

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome. const puppeteer = require(‘puppeteer’); (async () => { const browser = await puppeteer.launch(); const page = await browser.newPage(); await page.goto(‘https://example.com’); await page.screenshot({path: ‘example.png’}); browser.close(); })(); Puppeteer – […]

Chromeless Playground: Chrome Automation Made Simple

With Chrome 59 came the ability to run a Headless Chrome. Controlling it via code isn’t that easy nor elegant. Enter Chromeless (not be confused with Mozilla’s Chromeless): With Chromeless you can control Chrome (open website, click elements, fill out forms…) using an elegant API. This is useful for integration tests or any other scenario […]

Chrome DevTools’ Command Menu

Something I learnt via Umar Hansa‘s great DevTools Tips is that the Chrome DevTools sport a Command Menu. By hitting SHIFT+CMD+P (same shortcut as Sublime Text’s command menu BTW) you can open it. Thanks to fuzzy matching you can easily access things in it. Chrome DevTools: UI: Command Menu → Umar Hansa’s Twitter Account is […]

Chrome DevTools Tip: Blackboxing Scripts

The Chrome DevTools have this neat feature where you can “blackbox” JavaScript source files. Upon blackboxing a script the debugger will jump over anything contained in that file when stepping in/out/over code, and not pause on any breakpoints also contained in that file. A typical example would be to blackbox the script of the JS […]