How to get around “Insecure download Blocked” in Selenium WebDriver

Chrome v122+ blocks downloads from insecure sites by default. How to get around that in your Selenium scripts

This article is included in Web Test Automation with Selenium Case Studies series.

Recently, one of my Selenium WebDriver automated tests related file downloading failed. After inspecting, I found that Chrome blocked the downloading with the message Insecure download blocked.

The second try was manual retry to verify.

It might be due to a recent Chrome (v122) or its ChromeDriver update, as it was working before. The reason is that the site I’m downloading from (http://mail.server:1080) is not secure, i.e., it is not HTTPS.

MailCatcher

This is MailCatcher, a fake SMTP server that assists in E2E testing.

Testing Emails in Automated Test Scripts with a Fake SMTP server: MailCatcher