27 Mar 2018 · Software Engineering

    PhantomJS Is Dead, Use Chrome Headless in Continuous Integration

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    PhantomJS Is Dead, Use Chrome Headless in Continuous Integration

    If you’ve been using PhantomJS for continuous integration, please switch to Headless Chrome. Semaphore provides recent versions of both Chrome and chromedriver preinstalled out of the box.

    In April 2017, Vitaliy Slobodin who was at the time the sole maintainer of PhantomJS, announced that he’s stepping down as maintainer, leaving the project effectively abandoned:

    I think people will switch to it, eventually. Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn’t eat memory like crazy.

    I don’t see any future in developing PhantomJS. Developing PhantomJS 2 and 2.5 as a single developer is a bloody hell. Even with recently released 2.5 Beta version with new and shiny QtWebKit, I can’t physically support all 3 platforms at once (I even bought the Mac for that!). We have no support. From now, I am stepping down as maintainer.

    Source: Headless Chrome is coming, YCombinator.

    On March 8, 2018 the creator of PhantomJS Ariya Hidayat announced that the project will be archived.

    PhantomJS 2.1.1 is the last stable version, and will remain available on Semaphore. But we recommend switching to Headless Chrome as soon as possible for improved stability and performance. Using Selenium with Firefox is another solution, which has, in our experience of providing technical support, been rock-solid for many years.

    Big thanks to all PhantomJS developers who’ve worked on the project over the years.

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    Writen by:
    Marko Anastasov is a software engineer, author, and co-founder of Semaphore. He worked on building and scaling Semaphore from an idea to a cloud-based platform used by some of the world’s engineering teams.