[keycloak-dev] Htmlunit vs PhantomJS vs Chrome

[Marek Posolda]

 From what I see, there is no support for other protocol besides HTTP. 
All the WebDriver implementations despite HtmlUnit extends from 
RemoteWebDriver, which uses the CommandExecutor interface for 
communicate with the server. In theory, the CommandExecutor 
implementation is pluggable, but in reality, all the implementations 
uses HTTP based command executor, which uses Apache HTTP Client under 
the covers to communicate with the selenium server and they don't 
provide straightforward way to use something different.

Not sure if there is some performance improvement in newest version? We 
use the WebDriver version, which uses selenium 2.53.0. Now there is 
already version 3 available.

Marek

On 08/06/17 09:20, Vaclav Muzikar wrote:
> I agree with Marek - I don't think it would do any good for us as the 
> default browser.
> Imho the new headless mode doesn't make a much difference for us - the 
> Chrome would be working on the same principle as before (through 
> ChromeDriver).
> Moreover, Chrome and ChromeDriver would need to be 
> downloaded/installed from external sources - yet, this could be 
> perhaps solvable with Maven (at least ChromeDriver as it's in the 
> Maven repo).
>
> On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 9:53 PM, Marek Posolda <mposolda at redhat.com 
> <mailto:mposolda at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     Just a note, the main reason why htmlUnit web driver is so faster than
>     other browsers is, that it is fully embedded in the same JVM like
>     tests.
>     There is no additional overhead in the communication with other
>     processes. The only exception are the HTTP requests for the
>     communication with the tested Keycloak server and adapters.
>
>     On the other hand, the other web driver implementations, including
>     phantomJS, are using external process and there is remote selenium
>     server with which the webDriver needs to communicate. It means
>     that all
>     the webDriver calls including the most simple (like
>     driver.getTitle() )
>     need to send additional HTTP request to the remote selenium server
>     under
>     the covers. All of this adds an additional overhead.
>
>     I suspect that headless chrome will also use remote selenium, hence I
>     don't expect that performance will be much better comparing to
>     phantomJS. But maybe I am wrong..
>
>     Marek
>
>     On 07/06/17 12:14, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>     > We've picked Htmlunit as the default browser to run tests with
>     due to it
>     > being the fastest. Downside is that it simply doesn't work very
>     well for
>     > all tests, especially those heavy on the javascript side of
>     things like
>     > testing the JavaScript adapter and admin console.
>     >
>     > Just saw that Chrome is actually bringing a headless option to
>     Chrome 59
>     > [1]. This is really nice as it allows headless testing with a
>     real browser,
>     > not just an emulated browser.
>     >
>     > Ideally if this is fast we could use it as the default browser
>     instead of
>     > htmlunit. Obviously waiting until it's released on all
>     platforms. If it's
>     > not as fast as htmlunit then maybe there is a compromise.
>     >
>     > The default browser would still be htmlunit. Then individual
>     tests could be
>     > marked (with an annotation on the class or on the WebDriver
>     field). Those
>     > marked would use Chrome in headless mode instead of htmlunit.
>     Obviously
>     > -Dbrowser would continue to override the browser in either case.
>     >
>     > Thoughts? Anyone interested in giving the new headless Chrome
>     option a spin
>     > and evaluating how fast it is compared to htmlunit?
>     >
>     > [1]
>     https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome
>     <https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome>
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>
> -- 
> Václav Muzikář
> Quality Engineer
> Keycloak / Red Hat Single Sign-On
> Red Hat Czech s.r.o.