chromote (development version)

Chrome v132 and later no longer support old headless mode. As such, chromote no longer defaults to using --headless=old and now uses --headless when running Chrome. You can still use the chromote.headless option or CHROMOTE_HEADLESS environment variable to configure the --headless flag if you're using an older version of Chrome. (#187)
Added chromote_info(), a new utility function to print out key information about chromote and Chrome. Useful when debugging chromote or reporting an issue. (#190)

chromote 0.3.1

The headless mode used by Chrome can now be selected with the chromote.headless option or CHROMOTE_HEADLESS environment variable.

In Chrome v128, a new headless mode became the default. The new mode uses the same browser engine as the regular Chrome browser, whereas the old headless mode is built on a separate architecture. The old headless mode may be faster to launch and is still well-suited to many of the tasks for which chromote is used.

For now, to avoid disruption, chromote defaults to using the old headless mode. In the future, chromote will follow Chrome and default to "new" headless mode. (And at some point, Chrome intends to remove the old headless mode which is now offered as a separate binary.) To test the new headless mode, use options(chromote.headless = "new") or CHROMOTE_HEADLESS="new" (in .Renviron or via Sys.setenv()). (#172)

Breaking change: Chromote$is_active() method now reports if there is an active connection to the underlying chrome instance, rather than whether or not that instance is alive (#94).

Chromote and ChromoteSession gain print methods to give you a snapshot of the most important values (#140).
Chromote gains a new is_alive() method equivalent to the old is_active() method; i.e. it reports on if there is an active chrome process running in the background (#136).
ChromoteSession now records the targetId. This eliminates one round-trip to the browser when viewing or closing a session. You can now call the $respawn() method if a session terminates and you want to reconnect to the same target (#94).
ChromoteSession$screenshot() gains an options argument that accepts a list of additional options to be passed to the Chrome Devtools Protocol's Page.captureScreenshot method (#129).
ChromoteSession$screenshot() will now infer the image format from the filename extension. Alternatively, you can specify the format in the list passed to options (#130).
--disable-gpu is no longer included in the default Chrome arguments, except on windows where empirically it appears to be necessary (otherwise GHA check runs never terminate) (#142).

Fixed #109: An error would occur when a Chromote object's $close() method was called. (#110)
Fixed #99: When the $view() method was called, recent versions of Chrome would display "Debugging connection was closed. Reason: WebSocket disconnected". (#101)
Fixed #89, #91: find_chrome() now checks more possible binary names for Chrome or Chromium on Linux and Mac. (thanks @brianmsm and @rossellhayes, #117)
Fixed #22: Added a new chromote.timeout global option that can be used to set the timeout (in seconds) for establishing connections with the Chrome session. (#120)