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I am interested in getting the browser Version

I've two questions-

Question 1:- is there is a way to find out the browser version without setting up the browser? or can we force stop the downloading of the Driver in the first place. It is possible with the below code but the driver will be downloaded in this case.

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();  //without doing this step
WebDriverManager.chromedriver().getDownloadedDriverVersion();

Question 2:- Currently I am using wmic commands for browser detection which is used in WebDriverManager but it is failing on some systems. what more alternatives ways are used in the WebDriverManager to fetch the browser version. I am curious to know about this as I've disabled wmic on my system still webDriverManager is working as usual(I guess with alternative methods within WebDriverManager).I am facing difficulties in understand the code. Please help me to understand the flow of the WebDriverManager like which methods/ways are used to detect the browser version and in what order.

Any help would be appreciated!

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Sadanand Kolhe
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  • last time I looked I think there were numerous fallback methods... the source is available at git. There will be different methods per browser and OS. For Chrome it's fairly easy to get the version number by folder name. (It creates a folder who's name is the version number in the directory of the executable.) Not sure that webdrivermanager uses that method though. – pcalkins Mar 01 '22 at 00:07

2 Answers2

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WebDriverManager

WebDriverManager is the open-source Java library that maintains the configuration management of the drivers required by Selenium WebDriver (e.g., chromedriver, geckodriver, msedgedriver, etc.) in a fully automated fashion.

Additionally, WebDriverManager provides other relevant features, such as the capability to discover browsers installed in the local system, building WebDriver objects (such as ChromeDriver, FirefoxDriver, EdgeDriver, etc.), and running browsers in Docker containers seamlessly.

The primary use of WebDriverManager is the automation of driver management (i.e., download, setup, and maintenance) of the drivers involved in your Test Automation Suite. Hence using WebDriverManager it's highly unlikely you can force stop the downloading of the Driver in the first place.

However, when you use a specific browser version for the first time in a while the matched driver version is downloaded and saved within the cache which is pretty much evident from the generated logs.

====== WebDriver manager ======
Current google-chrome version is 98.0.4758
Get LATEST chromedriver version for 98.0.4758 google-chrome
There is no [win32] chromedriver for browser  in cache
Trying to download new driver from https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/98.0.4758.102/chromedriver_win32.zip
Driver has been saved in cache [C:\Users\Sadanand.Kolhe\.wdm\drivers\chromedriver\win32\98.0.4758.102]

Moving forward, if the browser version and the matched driver version remains unchanged and at the same time the previous version of the downloaded version of the driver is available within the cache, the fresh downloading is avoided, which is evident from the logs generated from two back to back test execution.

====== WebDriver manager ======
Current google-chrome version is 98.0.4758
Get LATEST chromedriver version for 98.0.4758 google-chrome
Driver [C:\Users\Sadanand.Kolhe\.wdm\drivers\chromedriver\win32\98.0.4758.102\chromedriver.exe] found in cache
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Regarding Q1, as of version 5, WebDriverManager allows detecting if a given browser is installed or not in the local system. To this aim, each manager provides the method getBrowserPath(). This method returns an Optional<Path>, which is empty if a given browser is not installed in the system or the browser path (within the optional object) when detected. See doc.

Regarding Q2, WebDriverManager uses internally a knowledge database called commands database. This database is a collection of shell commands used to discover the version of a given browser in the different operating systems (e.g., google-chrome --version for Chrome in Linux). This database contains WMIC commands for Windows but also queries to the registry. See doc again.

Boni García
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  • Thanks for your reply, is there any way we can directly get the browser version in WebDriverManager ? – Sadanand Kolhe Mar 02 '22 at 05:49
  • Also, on my system WMIC is turned off and REG is disabled by administrator (getting the same error when run reg query independently through java code), but WebDriverManager is woking fine. Please let me know is there any other fallback methods? – Sadanand Kolhe Mar 02 '22 at 07:10