Issues with Firefox Headless

I tried to use Firefox (v67b/Win10 and v66/Ubuntu) in headless mode according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Headless_Mode. I tested several variations of the screenshot recording command (one dash or two, with or without “–headless”, with or without image path).

It seems the instructions given in the MDN documentation don’t work anymore. In Windows, Firefox background processes were started and kept running but didn’t record anything. In Ubuntu, I got the response “You are running in headless mode”, but nothing else.

I reported this issue to the Firefox support forum (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1256647) but a top contributor there suggested that this might rather be a documentation issue than a software bug. If somebody knows how (or if) Firefox headless mode works I’d be grateful to know.

Unfortunately, you’ve stumbled into documentation we don’t actively maintain anymore. MDN’s focus has more and more moved into coverage of the open web rather than Firefox internals, and articles such as that one may be out of date, and are unlikely to be updated unless a volunteer does so. You probably should try asking in the Firefox Development topic.

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Thank you, Eric. While I can understand that you focus on the crucial project of documenting web standards (what would I do without MDN?) I’m sorry to hear that because Firefox’ good documentation was always a plus compared to Chrome. It probably would make sense to mark outdated pages as such.

(If anybody needs a solution to this problem: The guys at the Firefox support forum helped me find one - see link above.)

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