How do you choose the best headless browser for web scraping?

In my experience, the speed and performance will depend heavily on both the request limitations of the website and the functionality of your code. I use the Selenium framework in a Chromium browser since it offers robust python documentation and support as well as an option to revert back and forth between a headless and original browser for testing and debugging. The main takeaway is that all of these options are able to save on time and computation costs in a headless browser vs. in a regular browser.

It also depends on the websites we're sending requests to. In my experience, knowing JavaScript well, Puppeteer with Chromium worked great for me, saving a lot of time by skipping unnecessary rendering. Selenium is also reliable, but sometimes it gets noticed by websites. For Python-based scraping, Scrapy is better than Beautiful Soup, offering advanced features and flexibility.

There is no single answer; it will depend on the website you're scraping and the scale you trying to achieve. The popular ways to use headless browsers are via Selenium and Playwright. Some websites have anti-scraping technologies which can identify headless browsers. Selenium gets caught easily compared to the playwright. The answer is to test different options and see which one passes. Generally, Playwright with Firefox is a good option.

I've found that in many instances you can skip the browser all together. Many examples of JavaScript make network calls that you can replicate directly with post or get request. This is not always an option but when it is the performance is well above browser based scraping.

It's good to note what exactly you want to scrape from this website; based on that, you should choose the most suitable option, also documenting the requirements of your scraping task can help in making an informed decision.

What data are you scraping, each scrape for example requires a human eye as if one is scraping for email addresses many companies will now plant honey traps. Use this email address and your IP address is blocked.

One of the best practices is to try to scrape one page, identify the issues, and then search online for the best browser to handle this issue.

When in doubt, and all browsers have the same functionality, always seek the simplest option. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best to use.

Try to understand the legal issues of scraping each site. Don't get carried away with how to bypass the security without noting if it is even legal to do that or not.

Other things I would consider. Cost - Are there any licensing cost or cost for additional features. Support - Is there active ongoing community support for your chosen web scraping framework? Can you get questions answered in a timely manner? Is this framework/browser receiving active updates? Can you find engineers with experience in these tools readily available or is it more niche? Skill Set - Does the tool match the skill set of the engineer or team? If your staff does mainly use C# and the scraper only has support in Ruby then maybe it would be more advantageous to pick different option.

There are also many other factors that you might face, for example, current compatibility with recent technology, like the last update of ChromeDriver compared to the last version of Chrome. By time and experience, you will know when to switch to another solution and when you should keep trying.