Why you should stop using PhantomJS

Its successor has arrived

PhantomJS was an awesome project. Be it for testing, measuring network transfer times or scraping; it did a pretty good job. I’m using the past tense here because the most active maintainer (Vitaly Slobodin) has left the project.

PhantomJS and related projects downloads (courtesy of npm-stat.com)

Although PhantomJS is still downloaded about 3M times a month (mostly from CI services for unit tests), it would be an error to use it for your next scraping or website automation project.

The latest official version does not support React, newer SPAs and ES6+ for that matter. Its API is not the most modern thing in the world, to say the least. It leaks memory profusely and quickly crashes when you begin doing serious scraping.

But it’s okay. Headless Chrome is here now.