I’m working with a headless browser setup using Python and Selenium WebDriver. My goal is to open and load several web pages at the same time instead of waiting for each one to finish loading before starting the next.
Right now my script processes pages one by one which takes too long. I need a way to make these page loads happen in parallel or use non-blocking calls.
I’ve read that headless browsers can handle multiple tabs and run in background threads, but I’m not sure how to actually implement concurrent page loading in my code.
Has anyone found a good approach for this? I’m open to different solutions whether it’s using specific WebDriver methods, switching to a different headless browser, or using some other automation library that supports async operations better.
if u wanna do concurrent loading, give playwright a shot. its async features make it way simpler than selenium for this, just use await with page.goto() to fire em off at once. selenium’s a bit of a pain for multithreading, while playwright’s designed for this!
Here’s what works for me: use asyncio with aiohttp for basic page fetching, then spin up selenium only when you hit JavaScript-heavy stuff. This hybrid approach saves tons of resources vs running multiple full browsers. You can also use selenium’s window handles to open multiple tabs in one browser session - just run driver.execute_script(“window.open(‘’);”) for new tabs, then switch with driver.switch_to.window(). Way less memory than separate drivers but you still get concurrent loading. Just make sure you manage the window switching well so individual page loads don’t block everything.
I’ve hit this same problem in my selenium projects. ThreadPoolExecutor from concurrent.futures solved it for me - just spawn multiple webdriver instances where each thread gets its own driver and processes pages separately. Watch your resource usage though. Too many instances will eat your RAM alive. I stick to 4-6 threads max, depending on how strict the target sites are with rate limiting. Don’t try sharing one webdriver across threads - you’ll get sync issues that’ll drive you crazy. Give each thread its own instance instead.