Best Headless Browsers for Mac

Connect to the world on the browser built by Google. Google builds powerful tools that help you connect, play, work and get things done. And all of it works on Chrome. With Google apps like Gmail, Google Pay, and Google Assistant, Chrome can help you stay productive and get more out of your browser.

Mozilla Firefox is a free, open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to internet health and privacy. Designed to prioritize user privacy and security, Firefox offers features like Total Cookie Protection, which provides outstanding privacy by default. The browser includes tools such as Firefox View, allowing users to see tabs open on other devices and access recent history, and built-in PDF editing capabilities, enabling form edits directly within the browser. Available across various platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, Firefox ensures a consistent and secure browsing experience. Its commitment to user-centric development and transparency makes it a preferred choice for those seeking a trustworthy alternative to proprietary browsers.

Bright Data is the world's #1 web data, proxies, & data scraping solutions platform. Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions and small businesses all rely on Bright Data's products, network and solutions to retrieve crucial public web data in the most efficient, reliable and flexible manner, so they can research, monitor, analyze data and make better informed decisions. Bright Data is used worldwide by 20,000+ customers in nearly every industry. Its products range from no-code data solutions utilized by business owners, to a robust proxy and scraping infrastructure used by developers and IT professionals. Bright Data products stand out because they provide a cost-effective way to perform fast and stable public web data collection at scale, effortless conversion of unstructured data into structured data and superior customer experience, while being fully transparent and compliant.

Most things that you can do manually in the browser can be done using Puppeteer! Puppeteer-core is intended to be a lightweight version of Puppeteer for launching an existing browser installation or for connecting to a remote one. Be sure that the version of puppeteer-core you install is compatible with the browser you intend to connect to. Puppeteer will be familiar to people using other browser testing frameworks. You create an instance of Browser, open pages, and then manipulate them with Puppeteer's API. By default, Puppeteer downloads and uses a specific version of Chromium so its API is guaranteed to work out of the box. To use Puppeteer with a different version of Chrome or Chromium, pass in the executable's path when creating a Browser instance.

Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed. Playwright waits for elements to be actionable prior to performing actions. It also has a rich set of introspection events. The combination of the two eliminates the need for artificial timeouts - the primary cause of flaky tests. Playwright assertions are created specifically for the dynamic web. Checks are automatically retried until the necessary conditions are met. Configure test retry strategy, capture execution trace, videos, screenshots to eliminate flakes. Browsers run web content belonging to different origins in different processes. Playwright is aligned with the modern browsers architecture and runs tests out-of-process. This makes Playwright free of the typical in-process test runner limitations.

Kameleo for Multi-Account Management Kameleo antidetect browser lets you securely manage multiple social media accounts and e-commerce accounts (like Amazon, eBay, TikTok, Meta, and Google Ads) from a single computer. Each account stays distinct with unique browser fingerprints. Our revolutionary masking engine mimics real user behavior, so you can focus on growing your business without worrying about account bans. It also supports team collaboration, cloud storage, and profile sharing options between team members. This makes it easy to collaborate, manage multiple accounts together, and stay organized. Kameleo for Web Scraping Kameleo provides a powerful antidetect browser for better data collection on websites with anti-bot detection systems. It combines headless browsers, built-in proxies, and top-tier automation framework support for smooth web scraping. You can run it on your own infrastructure for more control and performance.

PhantomJS is a headless web browser scriptable with JavaScript, running on Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. Utilizing QtWebKit as its back-end, it offers fast and native support for various web standards, including DOM handling, CSS selectors, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. This makes it an optimal solution for tasks such as page automation, screen capture, headless website testing, and network monitoring. For example, a simple script can load a webpage and capture it as an image.

HtmlUnit is a "GUI-Less browser for Java programs" that models HTML documents and provides an API to interact with web pages, such as invoking pages, filling out forms, and clicking links, similar to a standard web browser. It offers fairly good JavaScript support, which is constantly improving and is capable of handling complex AJAX libraries, simulating browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or Edge depending on the configuration used. Typically used for testing purposes or retrieving information from websites, HtmlUnit is not a generic unit testing framework but is intended to simulate a browser within another testing framework such as JUnit or TestNG. It is utilized as the underlying "browser" by various open source tools like WebDriver, Arquillian Drone, and Serenity BDD, and is employed by many projects for automated web testing, including Apache Shiro, Apache Struts, and Quarkus.

SlimerJS is a free, open source scriptable browser for web developers, allowing interaction with web pages through external JavaScript scripts. It enables tasks such as opening web pages, clicking links, and modifying content, making it useful for functional tests, page automation, network monitoring, screen capture, and web scraping. Unlike PhantomJS, SlimerJS runs on top of Gecko, the browser engine of Mozilla Firefox, instead of WebKit, and can operate in both headless and non-headless modes. APIs of SlimerJS are similar to the APIs of PhantomJS but there are a few differences in their behavior. However, most of the scripts for PhantomJS run perfectly well with SlimerJS right now.