[🐛 Bug]: Selenium uses a browser downloaded by Selenium Manager instead of the system one

[lugi0]

What happened?

After upgrading to Selenium 4.13, my code started warning me that the chromedriver and chrome versions were not matching.

I made sure that my container had matching versions for the browser and webdriver I wanted to use

yum list --installed | grep "chrom"
chromedriver.x86_64                       116.0.5845.96-1.el9              @epel
chromium.x86_64                           116.0.5845.96-1.el9              @epel
chromium-common.x86_64                    116.0.5845.96-1.el9              @epel
libchromaprint.x86_64                     1.5.1-1.el9                      @epel

After much head scratching, I found this page: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/selenium_manager/#automated-browser-management
It looks like newer version of Selenium come with selenium manager by default, and there's no way to stop Selenium from using the browser(s) managed and cached by Selenium Manager

How can we reproduce the issue?

N/A

Relevant log output

The chromedriver version (116.0.5845.96) detected in PATH at /usr/bin/chromedriver might not be compatible with the detected chrome version (117.0.5938.92); currently, chromedriver 117.0.5938.92 is recommended for chrome 117.*, so it is advised to delete the driver in PATH and retry

Operating System

Fedora 38 / CentOS Stream 9

Selenium version

4.13 / 4.11.2

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

Chromium 116 / Chrome 117

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

ChromeDriver 116

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No

[github-actions]

@lugi0, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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[titusfortner]

Selenium does not download a browser if it doesn't need to.

Set the browser version in your options class. If it doesn't match what is present, selenium will download it. You can use 'stable' if you want it to keep up dynamically.

[titusfortner]

Just reread the issue.

That log output should not be what you see with 4.13. It should not complain if the major versions match

[lugi0]

that's exactly the problem @titusfortner , I have chromedriver and chromium set up in my container at matching versions, but then Selenium ends up using my chromedriver (116) and its own managed google chrome (117), thus the mismatch and warning.

Is there any way to disable selenium manager? I don't want it to mess with my container!

[lugi0]

Furthermore, I am using Selenium through Robot Framework and its SeleniumLibrary - I am using the headlesschrome alias as the browser I want to open, expecting it to use Chromium (since that's what is available in the system).
When I was using Selenium<4.11, this worked just fine - i.e. calling headlesschrome with Chromium installed would use the Chromium + Chromedriver combo from my system.
Now that I've upgraded to 4.13 (and even with 4.11.z) I keep getting this warning because Selenium assumes I want to use Google Chrome instead of the available Chromium

[lugi0]

I've also tried to set up the environment variables mentioned here: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/selenium_manager/#configuration
Specifically:

SE_BROWSER_VERSION=$(chromium-browser --version | awk '{split($0,a," "); print a[2]}')
SE_DRIVER_VERSION=$(chromedriver --version | awk '{split($0,a," "); print a[2]}')
SE_BROWSER_PATH=$(which chromium-browser)

But Selenium still tries to use Chrome 117 (even after deleting it from ~/.cache/selenium/chrome/linux64)

[lugi0]

Small update: The environment variables did indeed work, I just forgot to export them before running the code :D
However I would still like to stop Selenium from installing its own browsers by default rather than overriding these variables. Is there a way to do that?

[titusfortner]

It is finding Chrome v117 on your system somewhere, even if it isn't showing up in that list.

You can turn on logging to see where it finds it and you can remove it if you don't want it to use that.

If you want v116, specify "116" as browserVersion in Options class.
If you want to specify the browser location, specify the path as binary in Options class
If you want Selenium to skip using SM all together, specify the driver location in Service class

[lugi0]

It is finding Chrome v117 on your system somewhere, even if it isn't showing up in that list.

It's downloading it by itself in ~/.cache/selenium/chrome

[titusfortner]

where is your chromium installed?
Is it snap? Is it on PATH?

I think Selenium Manager is supposed to locate both Chromium and Chrome, but if it can't find it, then it will download it.

[titusfortner]

Oh, I thought we supported Chromium already, we do not: #12511

To use the installed version of Chromium instead of Chrome for Testing, you will need to pass in the location of the driver in the service class as specified above.

[lugi0]

To give some more food for though, I managed to solve it in my environment, but when running inside an OpenShift container I'm getting a weird error and I wasn't able to trace it back in the selenium-manager code, but you might want to take a look.

I managed to fix this one as well by not using the headlesschrome alias and instead using chrome with the --headless argument among the browser options, but I'm not really sure what the root cause is.
If I try to run the exact same scenario in my local machine (so, headlesschrome, no --headless option, SE_BROWSER_PATH pointing to my Chromium binary) everything works as it should