More consistent screenshots and clearer errors

If you compare screenshots of the same page over time, for example, before and after an update, differences that came from motion on the page made the comparison fail. Screenshots taken when reducing motion now match more often, and some errors are clearer.

More consistent screenshots when reducing motion

• Sliders and carousels stop and show their first slide on many more sites.
• Script-driven fades, for example, popups and slide transitions, finish at once instead of being captured halfway.
• Looping animations that only move elements, such as scrolling logo strips and rotating badges, now start from the same point in every screenshot. Looping animations that fade keep their current state.
• Fonts and images that are still loading when the screenshot is about to be taken get up to 3 seconds more, so text and images are less often missing or in a fallback font.
• Sliders are checked again right before a full-page screenshot is taken.

Screenshots taken when reducing motion can therefore differ from the ones you took before: sliders show their first slide instead of whichever slide was visible.

Cookie banners

Blocking cookie banners hides the banners of common consent platforms more reliably. Before, a banner could appear in one screenshot of a page and not in the next.

Clearer errors

• matched_failed_request now names the requests that failed, up to five, with their HTTP status code or the browser’s error. Many failures are stylesheets that a site still links but that no longer exist, so check whether the named files matter before treating the page as broken.
• A stylesheet that loaded successfully but that the browser then cancelled no longer counts as a failed request for fail_if_request_failed.
• Password-protected sites, for example, staging sites behind HTTP authentication, now return the new host_requires_authentication error (HTTP 400) instead of network_error (HTTP 500). Pass the credentials in the authorization option. If your integration handles network_error for these sites, add the new code. With a custom proxy, these failures still return network_error.

Full-page screenshots

• Some pages that take over mouse-wheel scrolling kept full-page screenshots scrolling until the request timed out. They now render.
• The timeout error documentation explains what to do when a very long page takes too long to scroll.