BeginFrame in Chrome with virtual time

[Duke Dougal]

How do I do BeginFrame in Chrome these days with virtual time?

HeadlessExperimental.beginFrame doesn’t seem to be available anymore
even though it’s not listed as deprecated in dev tools.
HeadlessExperimental.enable is deprecated.

Is there any example of how to do BeginFrame anywhere using a recent
version of Chrome?

thanks

[Andrey Kosyakov]

Hi Duke,

Virtual time and manual frame control are not supported in the new headless, but are still available with headless_shell, which can be obtained as part of Chrome for Testing build. HeadlessExperimental.enable is marked as deprecated because it's not needed now, but it would still work provided you're using headless_shell. We do not officially support this API, but some examples are available in the form of tests under //headless/test/data/protocol/emulation.

Best regards,

Andrey.

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[Duke Dougal]

Hi Andrey

>> Virtual time and manual frame control are not supported in the new headless

So they've been dropped entirely? That's a pity I've built critical code around them. 

Is there any new way to get frame control to headful chrome - to be able to control the clock/virtual time?

thanks!

[Duke Dougal]

Hi Andrey

Is it documented anywhere the thinking behind the removal of virtual time and beginframe control?

It was one of the most useful features in Chrome it's hard to understand why its gone without a replacement.

thanks

On Tuesday, November 19, 2024 at 12:26:14 PM UTC+11 ca...@chromium.org wrote:

[Andrey Kosyakov]

Hi Duke,

On Mon, Nov 18, 2024 at 8:40 PM Duke Dougal <duked...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is it documented anywhere the thinking behind the removal of virtual time and beginframe control?

It was one of the most useful features in Chrome it's hard to understand why its gone without a replacement.

Just to clarify -- this feature has never been available in Chrome per se -- that is, in the headful browser. It would take an effort of a different magnitude to support virtual time in real Chrome given its complexity  and security requirements. 

The feature was (and still is) available in the headless_shell, which is a different browser (as in "a different content embedder that was only sharing the //content part, not the //chrome part with Chrome"), which was at some point shipped in the same binary as chrome and available as chrome --headless. We're not removing virtual time or manual frame control from headless_shell, we are removing headless_shell from Chrome, which is documented here. This article explains the difference between headless_shell and Chrome Headless. You can still use these features by getting headless_shell as described in that article.

Hope this helps,

Andrey,