The Latest chromedriver is version 85. (according to https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com) yet the latest chrome version is 84.
In my test app chrome is automatically updated as well as the chromedriver but since the latest chrome driver and the latest chrome version are no longer compatible this now results in errors.
Now my questions are: Is this normal behavior? Should I always expect the latest chromedriver & chrome version to be compatible?
Yes it is normal..
The chrome driver version 83 will work with chrome 83.. So here instead of the latest, you should go ahead to use latest of the 84.x version.
see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads
Chrome latest version is 85(However it might not be generally available right now), and the chrome driver is released to support chrome 85..
It is not normal if you are using protractor, and therefore webdriver-manager.
webdriver-manager should install the compatible stable ChromeDriver, but it seems there is an issue right now and someone jumped the gun to have 85 listed as stable.
You can see more in a thread on issue 376 from webdriver-manager
Here is a workaround that worked for me: Here is the copied work-around:
We have webdriver-manager installed as project dependency (npm install --save-dev webdriver-manager)
we call webdriver-manager update --versions.chrome 84.0.4147.30 prior to running our tests. This will install the 84 chromedriver version in ./node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/. (We just made this as a npm script in our package.json)
We then update the protractor.conf file to have this line in the root of exports.config: chromeDriver:"./node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_84.0.4147.30.exe"**
Protractor still installs chromedriverr 85, but it will use the 84 version.
** In our case, we run our protractor tests in docker, but develop mostly on windows. So I updated the protractor.conf to have this line so that it works in either:
chromeDriver: process.platform === "win32" ? "./node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_84.0.4147.30.exe" : "./node_modules/webdriver-manager/selenium/chromedriver_84.0.4147.30"
If you are using Selenium driven ChromeDriver you need to track the page ChromeDriver - WebDriver for Chrome.
However, you will still find two(2) flavours:
The current stable release is well tested and have passed the alpha and beta test before the public release and can be safely used in the Production Environment.
The current beta release is still under beta test and is exclusively for Chrome Canary, the Nightly build for developers and in any case shouldn't be used in the Production Environment.