It runs completely heedlessly on PhantomJS but still behaves (mostly) like a typical webkit browser. By avoiding the overhead of actually rendering the page in a GUI it can run standard Selenium tests noticeably faster and on a headless build server too.

This is especially beneficial if you want to use continuous testing IDE plugins like Infinitest or JUnitMax or simply to encourage developers to run end-to-end tests more frequently.

GhostDriver is written on top of PhantomJS, a headless WebKit browser which uses QtWebKit.

It’s already 35%-50% faster than ChromeDriver despite the fact that QtWebKit has the standard WebKit Javascript engine. QtWebKit is moving to the V8 JS engine (as used in Chrome) which means it’s only going to get faster…

It’s still work in progress and hasn’t implemented the entire Selenium wire protocol yet but it’s certainly one to watch.

Presentation at SeleniumConf 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqxkKIC2HDY

Find it on GitHub: https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver/

Implemented by: Ivan De Marino