Trouble with headless Chrome not opening a particular website
I’ve run into an issue with my automation script using headless Chrome. Oddly, it works fine for most URLs, but one particular site just doesn’t load. Here’s my setup:
- Chrome version: 70.0
- ChromeDriver: 2.44
Below is my code snippet:
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--headless", "--window-size=1400,600");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get(myUrl);
Interestingly, this code works with other URLs and even loads the problematic site when running in non-headless mode or with PhantomJS. However, attempting to retrieve the page source in headless mode returns an empty HTML structure:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head></head><body></body></html>
Any advice on what might be causing this or how to resolve it would be greatly appreciated.
hey there, have u tried updating ur chrome and chromedriver versions? sometimes older versions can be finicky w/ certain sites. also, maybe try adding a wait before grabbing the page source? like:
driver.manage().timeouts().pageLoadTimeout(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
that mite give the page more time to load properly. hope this helps!
Have you considered the possibility of JavaScript-heavy content on the problematic site? Headless Chrome sometimes struggles with dynamically loaded content. You might try increasing the page load timeout or implementing a wait strategy.
Another approach could be to use Chrome’s remote debugging protocol. This can provide more detailed insights into what’s happening during page load. You can enable it with:
options.addArguments(“–remote-debugging-port=9222”);
Then connect to this port to inspect network activity and console logs. This might reveal why the page isn’t loading properly in headless mode.
Lastly, ensure your ChromeDriver version is compatible with your Chrome version. Mismatches can cause unexpected behavior, especially in headless mode.
I’ve encountered similar issues with headless Chrome in the past. One thing that often helps is adding a user agent string to your ChromeOptions. Some websites detect headless browsers and block them, but spoofing a regular browser can bypass this.
Try adding this to your options:
options.addArguments(“user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.88 Safari/537.36”);
Another trick is to disable web security temporarily:
options.addArguments(“–no-sandbox”);
options.addArguments(“–disable-web-security”);
If these don’t work, you might need to investigate if the site is using any advanced detection methods. In that case, you may need to look into more sophisticated evasion techniques or consider using a different approach altogether.