[fbouvier]

You're right, the debugging part is a good use case for graphical rendering in a headless environment.

I see it as a build time/runtime question. At build (dev) time I want to have a graphical response (debugging, computer vision, etc.). And then, when the script is ready, I can use Lightpanda at runtime as a lightweight alternative.

[codetrotter]

I was doing a personal side project for a while where I was trying to make my own little Wayback Machine-alike. Mine was very rudimentary, built on top of Firefox and WebDriver plus Squid proxy.

For debugging purposes you could have your headless browser function as a HTTP Proxy Server, maybe? And in your headless browser you could capture a static snapshot of the DOM after your JavaScript runtime has executed the scripts for the page. Similar to how the archive.today guy serves static snapshots of websites. And then developers using your headless browser could point their Firefox or Chrome browser to the HTTP Proxy server hosted by your headless browser program, in order to get a static snapshot view of what the DOM is like after your headless browser has executed JavaScript from the page. And then Firefox or Chrome will render static HTML view of what the page looked like to your headless browser, that the developer can inspect to make decisions about further interactions with the page. As a tool for debugging.