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PhantomJS vs Serverless Chrome: What are the differences?
What is PhantomJS? Scriptable Headless WebKit. PhantomJS (www.phantomjs.org) is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.
What is Serverless Chrome? Headless Chrome on AWS Lambda. The aim of this project is to provide the scaffolding for using Headless Chrome during a serverless function invocation. Serverless Chrome takes care of building and bundling the Chrome binaries and making sure Chrome is running when your serverless function executes. In addition, this project also provides a few "example" handlers for common patterns (e.g. taking a screenshot of a page, printing to PDF, some scraping, etc.).
PhantomJS and Serverless Chrome can be categorized as "Headless Browsers" tools.
PhantomJS and Serverless Chrome are both open source tools. It seems that PhantomJS with 26.9K GitHub stars and 5.7K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Serverless Chrome with 1.95K GitHub stars and 192 GitHub forks.
I am using Node 12 for server scripting and have a function to generate PDF and send it to a browser. Currently, we are using PhantomJS to generate a PDF. Some web post shows that we can achieve PDF generation using Puppeteer. I was a bit confused. Should we move to puppeteerJS? Which one is better with NodeJS for generating PDF?
You better go with puppeteer. It is basically chrome automation tool, written in nodejs. So what you get is PDF, generated by chrome itself. I guess there is hardly better PDF generation tool for the web. Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology. It uses some old webkit port that's quite behind in terms of standards and features. It can be replaced with puppeteer for every single task.
I suggest puppeteer to go for. It is simple and easy to set up. Only limitaiton is it can be used only for chrome browser and currently they are looking into expanding into FF. The next thing is Playwright which is just a scale up of Puppeteer. It supports cross browsers.
Pros of PhantomJS
- Scriptable web browser13
- Depends on QT3
- No ECMAScript 62
Pros of Serverless Chrome
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What is PhantomJS?
What is Serverless Chrome?
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What companies use PhantomJS?
What companies use Serverless Chrome?
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