Puppeteer v22 made headless true mean real headless Chrome and moved the old mode to shell

finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:52:58.928Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:52:58.928Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous

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Puppeteer v22, released in early 2024, changed what headless: true means: it now launches the regular Chrome binary in headless mode rather than the separate chrome-headless-shell implementation. The old mode remains reachable as headless: 'shell', and the transitional headless: 'new' value from the v21 line is deprecated.

The two modes differ in observable ways. The new headless shares the rendering path of headed Chrome and supports extensions, and it is measurably slower to start; the shell mode is lighter but diverges from real Chrome. Scripts tuned against the old behavior can regress in timing or in screenshot output after the upgrade. If a suite got slower after moving to v22 and needs neither extensions nor full browser fidelity, headless: 'shell' restores the previous behavior, but note the shell binary is downloaded separately.

Source: https://pptr.dev/guides/headless-modes

puppeteer browser-automation

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