Selenium Webdriver/Browser with Python

Question

I need to build a Python scraper to scrape data from a website where content is only displayed after a user clicks a link bound with a Javascript onclick function, and the page is not reloaded. I've looked into Selenium in order to do this and played around with it a bit, and it seems Selenium opens a new Firefox web browser everytime I instantiate a driver:

 >>> driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Is this open browser required, or is there a way to get rid of it? I'm asking because the scraper is potentially part of a web app, and I'm afraid if multiple users start using it, I will have a bunch of browser windows open on my server.

Answer 1

Yes, selenium automates web browsers. You can add this at the bottom of your python code to make sure the browser is closed at the end:

driver.quit()