Testing / Selenium Interview questions

What is the difference between headless and headed mode in Selenium?

These control whether the automated browser renders a visible UI window during execution.

Headless	Headed
No visible browser window	Full visible browser window
Lower resource usage, common on CI	Higher overhead, common for local debugging
Enabled via browser Options arguments	Default when no headless flag is set

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--headless=new");

Unlike some newer frameworks, Selenium doesn't default to headless - it must be explicitly enabled through the relevant browser's Options class, and older headless implementations in Chrome sometimes behaved subtly differently from headed mode (different default window size, certain rendering quirks), which is part of why the newer --headless=new flag exists to better match real headed behavior.

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Selenium's default execution mode is: Headless

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Headed, unless explicitly configured otherwise

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There is no default

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The --headless=new flag exists mainly to: Disable headless mode entirely

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Better match real headed browser behavior than the older implementation

✓ Correct! Well done.

Speed up driver installation

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