I feel the same. No failure here. It served its purpose very well, while it was needed. It’s retiring while it’s still better than it’s replacement in a few areas...like proxy support.
I really hope Microsoft offers a headless IE / Edge at some point. It would be amazing to be able to use all 3 major browsers like this. Heck, get Safari in there too (though I feel like it should be doable with WebKit already).
Not quite. It's my understanding it's not as up to date or equivalent to the latest IE. When I tried looking around I just got a lot of confusing information about the control, how it applies (or doesn't) traditional IE hacks, etc.
Though I could be wrong but it didn't seem like an equivalent to headless chrome or firefox.
Correction: much easier to maintain irresponsibly. That binary you just downloaded and stuck somewhere some time ago - when was the last time it was updated? What about all of its underlying bundled static libraries? How certain were you ever of their up-to-dateness? Did you ever check what version of zlib it was using?
Distributions attempting to package phantomjs properly had one hell of a time trying to reproduce its builds reliably. Most gave up.
Distribution from author as binaries is a whole bundle of fail from the get-go.
The Chrome team also make Puppeteer, a node's library for interfacing with headless chrome, and has methods for making PDFs as well https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer