Manager on Selenium

A Curious Case of Selenium Manager Usage: What's Behind Chrome 127.0.6533.99?

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past two years, Selenium has included Selenium Manager, a CLI tool (written in Rust) that provides automatic management of drivers and browsers across all official language bindings (Java, JavaScript, Python, .NET, and Ruby). Its purpose is to simplify the developer experience: if you create a driver object like this:

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

Selenium Manager takes care of detecting whether Chrome is installed, downloading the required driver, and even provisioning a copy of Chrome for Testing (CfT) if Chrome is not present on the system. This also works for Firefox and Edge, on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Novelties in Selenium Manager 0.4.15

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Support for Firefox ESR

Selenium Manager 0.4.15 includes support for Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR). This way, Firefox ESR can be automatically managed with Selenium using the label esr in the browser version. Bindings languages set this browser version (like other accepted labels for browser versions, such as stable, beta, dev, canary, and nightly) using a browser option called browserVersion.

Support for Edge WebView2

Selenium Manager 0.4.15 allows automated driver management for Microsoft Edge WebView2. WebView2 is a component that enables embedding web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) in native apps, using Microsoft Edge as the rendering engine to display web content. At the time of this writing, WebView2 is available in Windows.

Status of Selenium Manager in October 2023

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Selenium Manager continues its development plan. As usual, in the latest releases, i.e., 0.4.13 and 0.4.14 (shipped with Selenium 4.13 and 4.14, respectively), we have fixed the problems reported so far. In these releases, the issues were related to the extraction of the Firefox binary from the self-extracting archive (SFX) in Windows and the advanced configuration through the configuration file (se-config.toml) and environment variables (e.g., SE_BROWSER). Moreover, these recent releases include new features, as explained below.

What's new in Selenium Manager 0.4.12, shipped with Selenium 4.12.0

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A new release of Selenium Manager is out. For this release, we made a relevant decision concerning the Selenium Manager versioning format. From now on, Selenium Manager will follow the same version as Selenium. Nevertheless, since Selenium Manager is still in beta, its major version is 0. Thus, Selenium 4.12.0 is shipped with Selenium Manager 0.4.12.

First, we made a substantial effort to stabilize the already available features on Selenium Manager. This way, the version includes several bug-fixing related to automated driver management or caching. You can find the details of the changes implemented in Selenium Manager 0.4.12 in the (newly created) changelog file.

What's new in Selenium Manager with Selenium 4.11.0

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As of version 4.6.0, all releases of Selenium (Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and .Net) are shipped with Selenium Manager. Selenium Manager is a binary tool (implemented in Rust) that provides automated driver management for Selenium. Selenium Manager is still in beta, although it is becoming a relevant component of Selenium.

So far, the main feature of Selenium Manager is called automated driver management. I use the term management for this feature (and not just download) since this process is broader and implies different steps:

Introducing Selenium Manager

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Most people’s first experience with Selenium ends up with an error message like this one:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.chrome.driver 
system property; for more information, see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/. The latest version can be 
downloaded from https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

Then they have to search the web for instructions on what to do with the drivers they download.

Selenium: now with batteries included!

The Selenium project wants to improve the user experience, and one of the first steps is to help all users to simplify how they set up their environment. Configuring browser drivers has been for many years a task which users need to perform in order to have a working environment to run Selenium.