About two weeks ago, I embarked on an ambitious project to create a headless browser using Go. Initially, I explored building an HTML parser and incorporating the V8 JavaScript engine, aiming to expose native Go objects to JavaScript. Although I made progress on both fronts, I opted to use the existing x/net/html package for HTML parsing instead. I also found v8go, a project that embeds V8 in Go, but had to fork it to include some essential features not yet supported. After enhancing the DOM model and adding JavaScript bindings, I successfully executed inline JavaScript as the DOM tree was built. Recently, I reached a key milestone where my browser can now fetch and run JavaScript from remote URLs, allowing for proper web testing. For example, my testing setup using Ginkgo and Gomega involves a simple HTTP server that serves an HTML file with a script tag, confirming the script executes correctly from the global scope. As I plan for future features, my next goal is to run a basic HTMX application, which will require additional browser APIs such as XMLHttpRequest and location. Although the project is still in its early stages, it’s available for exploration on GitHub.
Building a headless browser in Go sounds like quite an exciting and challenging undertaking! From my experience working with headless browsers, one of the biggest hurdles is ensuring full JavaScript support since modern web apps heavily rely on dynamic content rendered by client-side scripting. You made a great choice by integrating V8 and customizing v8go. I suggest keeping a close watch on updates or new releases from the v8go library as that could potentially reduce your maintenance overhead. Also, performance tuning will be essential, especially when testing web apps at scale—consider implementing caching mechanisms or optimizing your network requests to improve speed and efficiency. Good luck with your HTMX integration, seems like you’re on the right track!