Browser Grid

Browser Grid is a powerful component of the Catalyst SmartBrowz service that allows you to run multiple headless browsers in parallel on a configured grid. Browser Grid enables you to perform simultaneous and independent tasks across multiple headless browsers, all while maintaining greater control over configuring parameters that determine the scale and performance of your headless operations.

For example, imagine that you have to perform a patch update on your application. Before you bring it live, it would be best if you have an environment or setup where you definitively test the consequences and performance of the update across multiple machines, all operating independently. However, to achieve this with a physical setup would be expensive and resource draining. This is one of the solutions that SmartBrowz’s Browser Grid can solve seamlessly and resource efficiently.

By employing the right configuration in Browser Grid, you can employ the required number of headless browsers in the required number of Nodes and run the tests concurrently. More importantly, you can benefit from the following key features of Browser Grid:

• Your required automation operations can be completed using popular automation libraries like Pupeeteer, Playwright, and Selenium.
• Java, Node.js and Python function stacks are supported.
• This is an auto-scaling component. Browsers will only spawn when and if they are required.
• Requests made to the headless browsers in the grid greater than the load of their configuration can be queued for 30 seconds (if the automation library used to connect to the remote browser is Selenium) or 5 minutes (if the automation library used to connect to the remote browser is Puppeteer/Playwright).
• You have more control over the configurations of the browsers. You can choose to spawn headless Chrome (v137.0.7151.55) or headless Firefox (v136.0.4) browsers, or even a combination of them.
• You have default options to decide the configuration of the Browser Grid, such as Basic and Advanced. This choice needs to be made based on the request load of your use case.
• Browser Grid utilizes default alerts that will alert you automatically in the event of an error or an interruption in your grid.
• The Browser Grid console provides you access to a detailed dashboard that will update you on the grid’s live performance.

Being able to control and concurrently run multiple headless browsers with little to no infrastructure setup allows you to perform complex operations such as:

• Parallel automation testing: With multiple headless browsers, you can test large volume of test cases in parallel and ensure your CI/CD pipelines runs in an optimal manner.
• Load testing: You can seamlessly mimic multiple user sign-ups across different headless browsers with varying configurations to simulate traffic to your application, allowing you to check the performance and resilience of your application.
• Security testing: With multiple headless browsers running in parallel and auto scaling with demand, you can test for session handling, injection vulnerabilities and other security properties.
• SEO monitoring: Using multiple headless browsers you can check the performance of your keyword matrix, your pages ranking in search engines, and performance of your ads across several accounts.
• Ethical crawling and scraping: With the multiple browsers running in parallel on permitted websites and domains, you can significantly scale up your ethical scraping operations.