How to hide Firefox window (Selenium WebDriver)?

If you’re using Selenium RC or Remote WebDriver then you can run the browser instance on a remote, or virtual machine. This means that you shouldn’t have to worry about hiding the browser windows as they won’t be launching on your local machine.

Java

I had a similar problem with ChromeDriver (I needed to minimize the browser window while the tests are running). I could not find a better way to do it, so I ended up using the keyboard combination Alt+Space, N to do it. This should work only in Windows, the example uses the Java AWT Robot class to play the keyboard shortcuts:

//Alt + Space to open the window menu
Robot robot = new Robot();
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_SPACE);
robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_SPACE);
robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
Thread.sleep(200);

// miNimize
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_N);
robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_N);

If you are using KDE Desktop, you can make Firefox Windows to be initially opened being minimized. That made my day to me regarding this problem. Just do the following:

1. Open Firefox
2. Click on the Firefox icon on the top left corner of the menu bar -> Advanced -> Special Application Settings…
3. Go to the “Size & Position” tab.
4. Click on “Minimized” and choose “Apply Initially” (YES).

These settings will apply for new Firefox windows from now on and you will not be bothered with pop-ups anymore when running tests with Webdriver.

I used xvfb to solve the problem like this.

First, install Xvfb:

# apt-get install xvfb

on Debian/Ubuntu; or

# yum install xorg-x11-Xvfb

on Fedora/RedHat. Then, choose a display number that is unlikely to ever clash (even if you add a real display later) – something high like 99 should do. Run Xvfb on this display, with access control off:

# Xvfb :99 -ac

Now you need to ensure that your display is set to 99 before running the Selenium server (which itself launches the browser). The easiest way to do this is to export DISPLAY=:99 into the environment for Selenium. First, make sure things are working from the command line like so:

$ export DISPLAY=:99
$ firefox

or just

$ DISPLAY=:99 firefox

Below there is a link that helped me
http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium-headless/

Python

The easiest way to hide the browser is to install PhantomJS. Then, change this line:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

to:

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()

The rest of your code won’t need to be changed and no browser will open. For debugging purposes, use driver.save_screenshot('screen.png') at different steps of your code or just switch to the Firefox webdriver again.

On Windows, you will have to specify the path to phantomjs.exe:

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS('C:phantomjs-1.9.7-windowsphantomjs.exe')

Java

Have a look at Ghost Driver: How to run ghostdriver with Selenium using java

C#

How to hide FirefoxDriver (using Selenium) without findElement function error in PhantomDriver(headless browser)?

I found the easiest way was to use PhantomJS, per Stéphane’s suggestion. I downloaded the binary and put phantomjs in my PATH, in my case (Mac OS) in /usr/bin/. I like to retain the option of seeing what’s going on so I wrapped it like this (in Python):

def new_driver():
    if 'VISIBLE_WEBDRIVER' in os.environ:
        return webdriver.Firefox()
    else:
        return webdriver.PhantomJS()

References:
http://blog.likewise.org/2013/04/webdriver-testing-with-python-and-ghostdriver/
http://www.realpython.com/blog/python/headless-selenium-testing-with-python-and-phantomjs/

In Java, you can use HtmlUnitDriver to launch a headless browser session which will not actually open the browser.

Add the following dependency to your pom.xml (or download and reference the following):

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sourceforge.htmlunit</groupId>
    <artifactId>htmlunit</artifactId>
    <version>2.15</version>
</dependency>

… and test it it as you would a WebDriver driver instance:

 driver = new HtmlUnitDriver();
 driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
 driver.get("http://www.google.com");
 // etc..
 driver.quit();

Another similar question in SO: Avoid opening browser on remote server during selenium call

The default browser of PhantomJS is IE, though many browser features do not work there. If you want to open a headless(hidden) Firefox window, you can use the new feature of Firefox 56+.

With this feature you can get a headless driver like this:

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", firefoxDriverExePath);
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
options.addArguments("--headless");
FirefoxDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);

New versions of Chrome also have the headless option.

Firefox has a headless mode. If you want to use it, you just have to set it on binary options like this:

binary = FirefoxBinary("C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe")
options = webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
# set headless mode on
options.set_headless(True) 
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary,options=options)

Just add the following code.

import os
os.environ['MOZ_HEADLESS'] = '1'
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Just do (Python):

opts = webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
opts.headless = True
firefox = webdriver.Firefox(options=opts)

in options (Firefox options, chrome options )

set boolean headless to true by calling set_headless method.

just add these and it will work if you are using chrome, also useful in firefox

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
'''option to make driver work background'''
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')
chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')