Chromeless

[lucy24]

Anyone met this?
UA: Chromeless 1.3.0
IP: various regions best described as Zoned Industrial rather than Residential (34, 35, 52, 54)
First sighting: October 2017

From what I've seen so far it seems to be a very, very lifelike robot. An android (lower-case) as it were.

Incidentally, what on earth does “chromeless” (as an adjective) mean? Or what did it mean in 2005? It came up when I was searching for earlier posts.

[robzilla]

Chromeless is basically a headless browser based on Chrome; headless as in without the GUI or "chrome" I suppose. It's an open source project.

[keyplyr]

Yeah, it's been around for years although I rarely see it.

Thanks lucy24. I guess it wasn't documented.

[lucy24]

headless as in without the GUI

What does it do with image files? (Maybe I'm misunderstanding "without the GUI". I was thinking text-only, like Lynx.)

[keyplyr]

In Chromeless the GUI was replaced with a newer UI with more support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. One has to consider that GUI is an old standard. At the time Chromeless was introduced, it presented an alternative.

However, GUI was just expanded with other browsers to encompass the same advances and Chromeless fell by the wayside and the project is now inactive.

[robzilla]

I believe a headless browser will fully "render" a page the same way a normal browser would, it just doesn't translate that to pixels on a screen. So images would be loaded, stylesheets interpreted, Javascript executed, and so forth.

[keyplyr]

OK but the Chromeless browser isn't (wasn't] headless: [mozillalabs.com...]

[robzilla]

That seems to be a different project. Judging from the version number, it's probably this one [github.com].

[keyplyr]

Interesting. They look completely different. I guess since Mozilla's browser is now defunct, the name is up for grabs.

I think I test drove the Mozilla browser years ago. I used to do that alot until I ran into one I couldn't remove.