Chrome for Browser Testing

Execute Selenium test scripts against a specific version of Google Chrome browser.

3 min readAug 3

Selenium WebDriver v4.11 supports “Chrome for Browser Testing”, a new feature that Google added to make testing different browser versions easier, from v115 onwards.

Test Automation Engineers who use Selenium WebDriver regularly must have noticed the change in the ChromeDriver download page.

Goes to the “Chrome for Testing availability” page, and you see chromedrivers for several channels.

For normal use, you just click the ‘Stable’ link to navigate to the part below, copy the URL for your platform, and paste it into the browser address to get it.

Really, not much different from before.

Some will wonder “What is the benefits of this Chrome for Browser Testing then?” Let me show you an example.

Suppose, you want to run your automated tests against a specific version or the next version (beta) Google Chrome, version v116 at the time of my writing. You can set the browser version in Chrome::Options . Selenium WebDriver will fetch that version (if not installed) in the background, before executing the test script (the below is Selenium in Ruby binding).

 the_chrome_options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new      
 the_chrome_options.browser_version = "116"
 driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:chrome, :capabilities => the_chrome_options  )

On my first run, the test execution failed. It took a while, ~1 minute, installing Chrome v116 browser. Then I got the error below.