Is Playwright Chromium's Headless mode behaving differently on local Windows and an Ubuntu VPS?

Other Questions Headless Browser
1

Using Playwright for scraping, my local Windows setup retrieves the expected JSON data while an Ubuntu server redirects to the login page. Is this divergence in headless mode operation anticipated?

 def obtain_info(api_handler, target_url, auth_details):
     browser_instance = api_handler.chromium.launch(headless=True)
     session = browser_instance.new_context()
     page_instance = session.new_page()
     page_instance.goto(target_url)
     result_text = page_instance.inner_text('section')
     return result_text
2

I have observed a similar behavior where the headless mode on a Linux environment might trigger more stringent security checks compared to Windows. This could be due to differences in system configurations, environmental variables, or even variations in the browser libraries between platforms. In my experience, tweaking the browser context settings to mimic a non-headless environment, such as modifying the user agent or enabling more detailed debugging, has helped identify the issue. It might be worth exploring these adjustments to see if the redirection to the login page can be bypassed or justified more clearly.

3

I recently encountered a related issue where running Chromium in headless mode on Ubuntu resulted in different behavior compared to Windows. In my case, the issue was partly due to differences in the default configurations between operating systems. I resolved it by explicitly setting the user agent and adding flags to disable some of the security checks that seemed to be activated on Linux. Adjusting these settings provided a more consistent experience, which indicates that underlying environmental factors play a significant role in how headless operations are executed.

4

i had similar issues on linux. i solved it tweaking some chromium flags like --no-sandox and adjusting env settings to match windows more. might be differences in browser fingerprints in headless mode. give tht a try and see if it fixes your redirection problem.

5

In my experience, discrepancies between headless behaviors on Windows and Ubuntu have sometimes emerged due to subtle differences in how the browser emulates real user sessions. I encountered a similar issue when the site checked for specific window sizes and language settings that differed between my environments. Adjusting those parameters in my headless launch configuration helped mitigate the problem, ensuring that the site did not redirect unexpectedly. It appears that updating the emulation settings to closely resemble real-user profiles can often resolve these inconsistencies.

6

I found that headless mode on Ubuntu can sometimes be sensitive to missing system dependencies or specific network configurations that are usually set up by default on Windows. In my case, after checking system libraries and ensuring that environment variables and network proxy settings were correctly configured, I noticed an improvement. Additionally, I adjusted the viewport settings and explicitly set timeouts to give the page enough time to load. This helped avoid unexpected redirects since the browser could properly load and process all page elements as it would in a full browser session.