Best Headless Browsers for Windows

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.

Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web.

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.

Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web engine, which allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards. Servo is written in Rust, and shares code with Mozilla Firefox and the wider Rust ecosystem. Since its creation in 2012, Servo has contributed to W3C/WHATWG web standards by reporting specification issues and submitting new cross-browser automated tests, and core team members have co-edited new standards that have been adopted by other browsers. As a result, the Servo project helps drive the entire web platform forward while building on a platform of reusable, modular technologies that implement web standards. Pre-built nightly snapshots allow developers to try Servo and report issues without building Servo locally. Now that we’ve released our first developer preview, we’ll be investing in formal security audits and improving our security practices using both existing libraries and Rust.

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.

Zombie.js is a lightweight, headless testing framework for Node.js that enables developers to simulate browser environments for testing client-side JavaScript code without the need for a graphical browser. It allows for the automation of web interactions such as form submissions, link clicks, and navigation, facilitating full-stack testing in a simulated environment. Developers can utilize Zombie.js to perform actions like visiting web pages, filling out forms, and asserting conditions within their test suites. The framework integrates seamlessly with testing libraries like Mocha, providing a streamlined approach to writing and executing tests.

TrifleJS is a headless browser designed for test automation, utilizing the .NET WebBrowser class and the V8 JavaScript engine to emulate Internet Explorer environments. Its API is modeled after PhantomJS, making it familiar to users of that framework. TrifleJS supports various versions of Internet Explorer, allowing emulation of IE7, IE8, and IE9, depending on the installed version. Developers can execute scripts via the command line, specifying the desired IE version for emulation. The platform offers an interactive mode (REPL) for debugging and testing JavaScript code.

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.

jBrowserDriver is a programmable, embeddable web browser driver compatible with the Selenium WebDriver specification. It is headless, WebKit-based, and written in pure Java. The project is open source and licensed under the Apache License v2.0. To run jBrowserDriver from a remote Selenium server, start the remote Selenium server(s) and use the appropriate code to call jBrowserDriver remotely. For building from source, install and configure Maven v3.x and run mvn clean compile install from the project root. To use in Eclipse, either import the existing Java project from the root directory or import the Maven file. For usage, jBrowserDriver can be used like any other Selenium WebDriver or RemoteWebDriver and works with Selenium Server and Selenium Grid.