CasperJS : Why does my url change to about:blank when my page is loaded?

Question

I'm a beginner at PhantomJS/CasperJS.

I just want to start a session and verify that it's OK.

Here's my code:

var casper = require('casper').create({
    verbose: true,
    logLevel: 'debug',
    pageSettings: {
        loadImages: false,
        loadPlugins: false,
        userAgent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0'
    }
});

casper.on('remote.message', function(msg) {
    this.echo('remote message caught: ' + msg);
});

casper.on("page.error", function(msg,trace) {
    this.echo("Page Error: " + msg, "ERROR");
});

casper.start('https://www.google.fr');

casper.then(function(){
    console.log('Page Loaded');
    this.test.assertTitle('Google', 'Welcome to Google');
});

casper.run();

When I run this simple script, I get :

C:\Users\Booky\Documents\nike_project>casperjs --ignore-ssl-errors=true --ssl-protocol=tlsv1 debug.js

C:\Users\Booky\Documents\nike_project>[info] [phantom] Starting...
[info] [phantom] Running suite: 3 steps
[debug] [phantom] opening url: https://www.google.fr/, HTTP GET
[debug] [phantom] Navigation requested: url=https://www.google.fr/, type=Other, willNavigate=true, isMainFrame=true
[debug] [phantom] url changed to "https://www.google.fr/"
[debug] [phantom] Successfully injected Casper client-side utilities
[debug] [phantom] start page is loaded
[info] [phantom] Step anonymous 3/3 https://www.google.fr/ (HTTP 200)
Page Loaded
[debug] [phantom] Navigation requested: url=about:blank, type=Other, willNavigate=true, isMainFrame=true
[debug] [phantom] url changed to "about:blank"

I searched everywhere and I haven't found any response to my problem.

---

Environment

• PhantomJS 2.1.1
• CasperJS 1.1.0beta5

Answer 1

There are open issues (see update below) on CasperJS and PhantomJS Github Repos regarding redirecting to/opening about:blank page

• Issue 13738 Phantomjs opens a about:blank page instead of the URL

• Issue 1485 Redirect to url=about:blank

  Updated on March 09 2017: Issue 1485 solved. See @jefleponot comment on GitHub for the solution

  Haven't confirmed it myself, but @Ross commented that adding the option --ssl-protocol=any for phantomjs solved the issue

---

• --proxy-type=none command-line argument

On Windows, the default proxy setting may cause a massive network latency (see Known Issues in the release note). The workaround is to disable proxy completely, e.g. by launching PhantomJS with --proxy-type=none command-line argument. 1

---

Your code worked correctly, with the following versions :

• PhantomJS 2.1.1
• CasperJS 1.0.4
• MacOSX

---

[info] [phantom] Starting...
[info] [phantom] Running suite: 3 steps
[debug] [phantom] opening url: https://www.google.fr/, HTTP GET
[debug] [phantom] Navigation requested: url=https://www.google.fr/, type=Other, lock=true, isMainFrame=true
[debug] [phantom] url changed to "https://www.google.fr/"
[debug] [phantom] Successfully injected Casper client-side utilities
[debug] [phantom] start page is loaded
[info] [phantom] Step 3/3 https://www.google.fr/ (HTTP 200)
Page Loaded
PASS Welcome to Google
[info] [phantom] Step 3/3: done in 262ms.
[info] [phantom] Done 3 steps in 341ms

---

There were some issues with page navigation in casperjs 1.1.x beta and PhantomJS >1.9.8 where the recommendation was to downgrade PhantomJS to 1.9.7

---

I would recommend, if possible, to try different versions

Either Github Issue 1485 solution or @Ross solution may solve the problem - any comments?