How to Disable Javascript in Chrome (-headless) using PHP Webdriver

Question

I am using Chrome headlessly.

I tried setting the --disable-javascript command line argument.

I tried using the experimental options:

        $options->setExperimentalOption('prefs', [
            'profile.managed_default_content_settings.javascript' => 2//this does not work
            //,'profile.default_content_setting_values.javascript' => 2//this does not work, too
        ]);

        $capabilities = DesiredCapabilities::chrome();
        $capabilities->setCapability(ChromeOptions::CAPABILITY, $options);

As of this point these two do not work.

How can I disable javascript in Chrome using the Facebook PHP Webdriver ?

Here is a test to check if JavaScript is enabled:

        $this->driver->get('https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/is-javascript-enabled');
        return [
            $this->driver->getTitle(),
            $this->driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('.detected_result'))->getText()
        ];

Answer 1

It is simply impossible. Read here http://yizeng.me/2014/01/08/disable-javascript-using-selenium-webdriver/

WARNING: Running without JavaScript is unsupported and will likely break a large portion of the ChromeDriver's functionality. I suspect you will be able to do little more than navigate to a page. This is NOT a supported use case, and we will not be supporting it. Closing this as WontFix - the ChromeDriver (and every other WebDriver implementation I'm aware of) require JavaScript to function.

Answer 2

It's possible to disable the execution of Javascript by setting one of the these preferences :

"webkit.webprefs.javascript_enabled": false
"profile.content_settings.exceptions.javascript.*.setting": 2
"profile.default_content_setting_values.javascript": 2
"profile.managed_default_content_settings.javascript": 2

But it's currently not supported headlessly since this mode doesn't load the preferences and there's no command switch related to this feature.

Note that disabling JavaScript used to break Selenium since most of commands are atom scripts injected in the page. It's no longer the case. All the commands are able to run. However I noticed that the returned text doesn't include the text from a <noscript> element (text displayed only when JavaScript is disabled). One workaround is to read the innerText property with either execute_script or get_attribute.