In web automation selenium java when running code without a headless working fine but with headless chrome fails and i get error the element not found

Question

when running code with headed, its working fine, but with headless{chrome} fails and I get error the element not found using XPATH .

TimeoutError: Waiting for element to be located By(xpath, /html/body/div[5]/ul/li/div[2]) Wait timed out after 30003ms

But it finds it with headed. any suggestions, limitation ?

Answer 1

For a headless browser, you have to set the window size.

options= Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('window-size=1920x1080');

Comments

Why is setting the window size important for headless?

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The problem is that headless mode is meant to be used on computers without screens, so there's no way for it to figure out what size your screen is even if you have one. The only way is for you to pass that information to the browser with --window-size.

The default window size and display size in headless mode is 800x600 on all platforms.

So the maximized window size is not applicable for chrome-headless and needs to be explicitly set by users, if required.