Based on a quick read of the API, my interpretation is that this is not targeting people who are trying to automate every browser, but those who need to automate any browser.
In that context, it's dead-simple to use, and someone with very little experience should be able to get a working prototype in under 5 minutes.
For my use case, it's closer to "wget/curl with JS processing" than "automating a user's browsing experience". I don't particularly care which browser is doing the emulation, with the ease-of-use of the API making the biggest difference.
It seems very similar to PhantomJS, but to be honest, it's more attractive from an ongoing-support standpoint simply because it's an official Chrome project.
Exactly, this looks perfect for taking a screenshot of a page[1], or converting a page to a PDF[2] in just a few lines of code.
If you have an existing web service, this appears suitable for actual production usage to deliver features like PDF invoices and receipts, on-demand exports to multiple file formats (PNG/SVG/PDF) etc., which has quite different requirements compared to an automated testing framework.
The primary use-case for headless-chrome is to support stuff like scraping/crawling JavaScript-dependent sites and services, and emulating user workflows to retrieve data or trigger side effects that couldn't otherwise be achieved with something more low-level (curl, manual HTTP requests w/ Node's HTTP/S API etc).
headless-chrome would be used for the functionality of a server-side microservice, rather than for automated testing of UI/UX, there are already more appropriate projects to achieve that.
If you just need wget/curl with js, you can actually do that with the chrome CLI now. Just run your chrome binary with the arguments --headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom <url>
In that context, it's dead-simple to use, and someone with very little experience should be able to get a working prototype in under 5 minutes.
For my use case, it's closer to "wget/curl with JS processing" than "automating a user's browsing experience". I don't particularly care which browser is doing the emulation, with the ease-of-use of the API making the biggest difference.
It seems very similar to PhantomJS, but to be honest, it's more attractive from an ongoing-support standpoint simply because it's an official Chrome project.