Chromium team earlier introduced the infobar Chrome is being controlled by automated test software to disable Developer mode extension popup within Chrome Browser through this commit.
As per the discussion Flakiness due to Chrome automation infobar (Chrome 57+) with the addition of the infobar to display if a session is being controlled by an automated test within Chrome it was observed that the presence of Chrome automation infobar Chrome is being controlled by automated test software intermitently caused the click() function to fail. During the tests, when the the infobar was removed by passing disable-infobars within chrome_launcher.cc then the above tests runs as expected without any issues. gmanikpure@chromium.org confirmed that the culprit was the changelog:
Add an infobar if a session is being controlled by an automated test.
This infobar is only displayed if the browser is launched with the --enable-automation switch. It also disables the developer mode extensions warning bubble.
TEST=launch with and without --enable-automation, and check for presence of automation infobar
It was observed that, during a click the infobar animation occurs and we got flaky results. So Chromium team needed to detect this change somehow and recompute the position. The actual problem was, if a Page.frameResized occured we can invalidate the results of some operations and retry (e.g. get element position) but there were other operations that can modify the page, such as mouse clicks. It's possible that a mouse click (which involves a mousemove, mousedown and a mouseup event) can have a resize event in the middle.
Accordingly, Chromium team released a revision through this commit:
Disable info bar animations during automated testing.
Since then Chrome user, to disable the infobar started using:
Java:
options.addArguments("disable-infobars");
Python:
options.add_argument("disable-infobars")
C#:
option.AddArguments("disable-infobars");
Now in the discussion Chrome is being controlled by automated test software infobar doesn't gets suppressed despite using disable-infobars argument Chromium team member triciac@chromium.org clearly mentioned:
As of v 76, the ability to suppress the infobar was moved from command line options to Enterprise Policy settings for Chrome.
The change was already mentioned in the Release Notes and Chrome Enterprise release notes as follows
--disable-infobars is no longer supported
Chrome will no longer support the --disable-infobars flag, which was used to hide pop-up warnings
from Chrome Browser. To support automated testing, kiosks, and automation, the
CommandLineFlagSecurityWarningsEnabled policy was added to allow you to disable some security
warnings.
So, from Chrome v76.x onwards --disable-infobars flag is officially deprecated.
Conclusion
The policy is not an option or a capability that is set when ChromeDriver or Chrome is launched as security policies are typically managed by your corporate IT department. Hence usage of disable-infobars have been deprecated.
A small Hack
The --disable-infobars flag can still removed from Chrome v76.x using these 2(two) ExperimentalOption:
Excluding the switches for enable-automation- Setting
useAutomationExtension to False
Implementations
Here are the implementations:
Java:
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("start-maximized");
options.setExperimentalOption("excludeSwitches", Collections.singletonList("enable-automation"));
options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get("https://google.com");
Python:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
options = Options()
options.add_argument("start-maximized")
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options, executable_path=r'C:\Utility\BrowserDrivers\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://www.google.co.in')
Outro
As per the article CommandLineFlagSecurityWarningsEnabled:
Enable security warnings for command-line flags
Supported on: Google Chrome (Linux, Mac, Windows) since version 76
Description: If disabled, prevents security warnings from appearing when Chrome is launched with some potentially dangerous command-line flags.
If enabled or unset, security warnings are displayed when some command-line flags are used to launch Chrome.
On Windows, this policy is only available on instances that are joined to a Microsoft Active Directory domain or Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise instances that are enrolled for device management.
