PhantomJS

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2011–2023), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with PhantomJS, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

Updates silently break invoice formatting, changing rendered font size2023-06-26
Upgrades break things and there is no easy way to debug them2017-08-31
Slow, buggy, crashy tool that is hard to get working in Node2017-01-08
Simple website interactions are more difficult to script than they should be2017-01-08
Finds PhantomJS hard to use, mainly because its documentation is hard to follow2016-06-14
Painfully slow and difficult to interact with for scraping2016-04-28
Could not precisely control formatting when converting HTML to PDF2014-10-12
Hard to debug what is going on, unlike Firefox with a visible display2014-10-07
Scraping a single page with PhantomJS/CasperJS takes 5-10 seconds, slow to interact with2013-03-10
API is inconsistent: can render to file or Base64 but not stdout, forcing awkward workarounds2012-12-30
Documentation unusable; couldn't figure out how to do nontrivial task2012-08-06
Cryptic error messages when executing JavaScript in CasperJS2012-07-11