We wrote our scraper to use phantomjs via the selenium.webdriver interface in python 2, simply because for something like 80% of the sites we extract informatio

We wrote our scraper to use phantomjs via the selenium.webdriver interface in python 2, simply because for something like 80% of the sites we extract information from, the data was not fully available unless we could render the dynamic parts of the page. I am not at all surprised that Google's bot is executing js. I have assumed they could do this for years now. As for pure html front-ends, I understand the attraction, but when a single js-based implementation gets you consistent behavior and presentation across all browsers and mobile devices the advantages are pretty huge.