NEWS.md

In chromote: Headless Chrome Web Browser Interface

chromote 0.5.0

New features

• chromote now includes experimental features to download versioned binaries of Chrome and chrome-headless-shell for Mac (x64 or arm64), Windows (32- or 64-bit) or Linux (x86-64) from the Chrome for Testing service. (#198)
• Use with_chrome_version() or local_chrome_version() to temporarily switch to a specific version of Chrome. The appropriate binary will be downloaded automatically if not yet available locally.
• Use chrome_versions_list() to list installed or available versions of Chrome.

• Or use chrome_versions_add() and chrome_versions_remove() to manually add or remove a specific version of Chrome from chromote's cache.

• ChromoteSession gains two new helper methods: $set_viewport_size() and $get_viewport_size(). These methods allow you to change the viewport size – effectively the virtual window size for a page – or to get the current viewport size. If you previously relied on $Emulation$setVisibleSize() (now a deprecated method in the Chrome DevTools Protocol), $set_viewport_size() is a good replacement as it uses Emulation.setDeviceMetricsOverride instead. (#206)

Improvements

• ChromoteSession$new() gains a mobile argument that can be used to set the device emulation in that session to emulate a mobile browser. The default is mobile = FALSE, which matches previous behavior. (#205)

• Chromote and ChromoteSesssion gain an $auto_events_enable_args() method that sets that arguments used by chromote's auto-events feature when calling the enable command for a domain, e.g. Fetch.enable. (#208)

• The $view() method of a ChromoteSession will now detect when chrome-headless-shell is being used and will use the system browser (via utils::browseURL()) rather than the Chrome instance attached to chromote. (#214)

• chromote now has a hex sticker! Thank you to @davidrsch for the inspiration. (#216)

Bug fixes

• ChromoteSession$new() now sets width and height using Emulation.setDeviceMetricsOverride, which works for all Chrome binaries and versions. This fixes an issue with width and height being ignored for Chrome versions 128-133. (#205)

• Fixed a bug in chromote_info() on Windows with Powershell when no version info is returned. (#207)

• Chromote and ChromoteSession once again correctly handles connections to remote Chrome browsers via ChromeRemote. Calling $close() on a Chromote object connected to a remote browser no longer attempts to close the browser, and will now simply close the websocket connection to the browser. For local process, the Chromote$close() gains a wait argument that sets the number of seconds to wait for Chrome to gracefully shut down before chromote closes the process. (#212)

chromote 0.4.0

• Chrome v132 and later no longer support old headless mode. As such, chromote no longer defaults to using --headless=old and now uses --headless when running Chrome. You can still use the chromote.headless option or CHROMOTE_HEADLESS environment variable to configure the --headless flag if you're using an older version of Chrome. (#187)

• Added chromote_info(), a new utility function to print out key information about chromote and Chrome. Useful when debugging chromote or reporting an issue. (#190)

• chromote now uses a consistent prefix for logs, e.g {tempdir}/chrome-{id}-stdout.log and {tempdir}/chrome-{id}-stderr.log. chromote also now uses --crash-dumps-dir to set a session-specific temp directory. (#194)

chromote 0.3.1

• Fixed a typo that caused launch_chrome() to throw an error. (#175)

chromote 0.3.0

• The headless mode used by Chrome can now be selected with the chromote.headless option or CHROMOTE_HEADLESS environment variable.

In Chrome v128, a new headless mode became the default. The new mode uses the same browser engine as the regular Chrome browser, whereas the old headless mode is built on a separate architecture. The old headless mode may be faster to launch and is still well-suited to many of the tasks for which chromote is used.

For now, to avoid disruption, chromote defaults to using the old headless mode. In the future, chromote will follow Chrome and default to "new" headless mode. (And at some point, Chrome intends to remove the old headless mode which is now offered as a separate binary.) To test the new headless mode, use options(chromote.headless = "new") or CHROMOTE_HEADLESS="new" (in .Renviron or via Sys.setenv()). (#172)

chromote 0.2.0

Breaking changes

• Breaking change: Chromote$is_active() method now reports if there is an active connection to the underlying chrome instance, rather than whether or not that instance is alive (#94).

Improvements and bug fixes

• Chromote and ChromoteSession gain print methods to give you a snapshot of the most important values (#140).

• Chromote gains a new is_alive() method equivalent to the old is_active() method; i.e. it reports on if there is an active chrome process running in the background (#136).

• ChromoteSession now records the targetId. This eliminates one round-trip to the browser when viewing or closing a session. You can now call the $respawn() method if a session terminates and you want to reconnect to the same target (#94).

• ChromoteSession$screenshot() gains an options argument that accepts a list of additional options to be passed to the Chrome Devtools Protocol's Page.captureScreenshot method (#129).

• ChromoteSession$screenshot() will now infer the image format from the filename extension. Alternatively, you can specify the format in the list passed to options (#130).

• --disable-gpu is no longer included in the default Chrome arguments, except on windows where empirically it appears to be necessary (otherwise GHA check runs never terminate) (#142).

chromote 0.1.2

• Fixed #109: An error would occur when a Chromote object's $close() method was called. (#110)

• Fixed #99: When the $view() method was called, recent versions of Chrome would display "Debugging connection was closed. Reason: WebSocket disconnected". (#101)

• Fixed #89, #91: find_chrome() now checks more possible binary names for Chrome or Chromium on Linux and Mac. (thanks @brianmsm and @rossellhayes, #117)

• Fixed #22: Added a new chromote.timeout global option that can be used to set the timeout (in seconds) for establishing connections with the Chrome session. (#120)

chromote 0.1.1

• Update docs for CRAN (#93)

chromote 0.1.0

• Initial package release

chromote documentation built on April 4, 2025, 1:43 a.m.