I know there’s quite a lot in Stackoverflow (and elsewhere) about “element not interactable” but I don’t think this is a duplicate.

My issue is that I get the selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotInteractableException ONLY if I try to run my code in headless mode.

Here’s the code. Don’t worry about what it’s trying to achieve other than provide a Minimal Reproducible Example

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver import ChromeOptions
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains

options = ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless")
user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
options.add_argument(f"user-agent={user_agent}")

QUERY = "museums in london"

# This bypasses the "automation" warning
def bypass(driver):
    try:
        wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 5)
        for button in wait.until(EC.presence_of_all_elements_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "button"))):
            if button.text.strip() == "Reject all":
                button.click()
                break
    except Exception:
        pass

with webdriver.Chrome(options=options) as driver:
    driver.get("https://www.google.com")
    bypass(driver)
    selector = By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'form[action="/search"] textarea[name=q]'
    textarea = WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.presence_of_element_located(selector))
    # The following Action sequence makes no difference to the program's behaviour
    ActionChains(driver).move_to_element(textarea).click(textarea).perform()
    textarea.send_keys(QUERY+Keys.RETURN)
    urls = set()
    selector = By.CSS_SELECTOR, "cite[role=text]"
    for cite in WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.presence_of_all_elements_located(selector)):
        if text := cite.text.strip():
            urls.add(text)
    print(*urls, sep="n")

As shown, I’m trying to do run the Chrome driver in headless mode. If I do that I consistently get the ElementNotInteractableException at the point where I try to invoke send_keys().

If you remove the addition of the –headless argument to the ChromeOptions class, the code runs without error.

I had hoped that the ActionChains code would help but it makes no difference to the program’s behaviour whether in headless mode or not. I just left it in in case anyone suggested it as a potential workaround.

Why is this only a problem when in headless mode? What can be done about it?