Question

I’ve spent the last few days messing around with Selenium, Tor, and Firefox as a combination for multiple tasks. I’ve managed to write a simple script in Python that takes control of Firefox through Selenium, while Firefox is connected to Tor for privacy.

Now, I’m looking for a way to save resources, so I thought of running Firefox in headless mode, which I thought was a common feature but it doesn’t seem to be that. I’m looking for a method to do just that. The reason for it being Firefox and not some terminal based browser is because of the extension “TorButton” that I’m using within Firefox. It has javascript injections built in to it that help with privacy.

If anyone has done this before (which I’m sure many have!), some tips would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

Answer 1

xvfb is a common way of doing this. Searching for “selenium xvfb” should find lots, such as:

• Is it possible to run Selenium scripts without having an X server running, too?
• How do I run Selenium in Xvfb?
• http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium-headless/