I’ve been working with WatiN for my Specflow BDD testing setup and while it gets the job done, the performance is really slow. I came across SimpleBrowser recently which runs much faster than WatiN, but it has a major limitation - no JavaScript support means AJAX functionality doesn’t work.
Does anyone know of headless browser solutions that can handle JavaScript execution? I need something that can process AJAX requests properly for my automated tests. Would appreciate any recommendations and thoughts on whether switching from WatiN would be worth it for better performance while maintaining JavaScript capabilities.
selenium webdriver with chrome headless is probaly your best bet nowadays. phantomjs works but its not maintained anymore so i’d avoid it for new projects. selenium handles js and ajax perfectly fine, plus you can run it headless for better performance than regular browsers
I transitioned from WatiN to PhantomJS about two years ago, and it has had a profound impact on my testing setup. PhantomJS, being a headless WebKit browser, executes JavaScript seamlessly, which is essential for AJAX functionality in BDD testing. I noticed a remarkable improvement in performance; tasks that previously took around 30 minutes with WatiN now complete in under 10 minutes. While PhantomJS is stable for current use, you may want to consider Chrome headless mode as a more future-proof option, since it also handles JavaScript effectively and is actively maintained by Google.
Playwright has become my go-to solution for this exact scenario. After dealing with similar WatiN performance issues, I switched to Playwright and haven’t looked back. It handles JavaScript and AJAX requests flawlessly while running headless by default. The speed improvement was immediate - tests that used to crawl along now execute in a fraction of the time. What really sold me was the reliability; I rarely encounter the flaky test issues that plagued my WatiN setup. Playwright also supports multiple browser engines (Chromium, Firefox, Safari) so you can test cross-browser compatibility without additional setup. The .NET bindings integrate well with SpecFlow, making the migration relatively straightforward.