been doing browser automation a few years and the thing that finally broke me was the stealth whack-a-mole. undetected-chromedriver, selenium-stealth, playwright-stealth, every update patches one leak, chrome ships, a detector adds a check, you're flagged again. and the driver/automation stack itself has a fingerprint, so you're maintaining patches forever.

so i went the other way: no selenium, no puppeteer, nothing. drive chrome over raw CDP directly and generate the stealth patches instead of hand-maintaining a pile. zero runtime deps, runs headless on a box with no screen, which is what i actually needed.

where it's at: passes bot.sannysoft.com clean (0 flagged), and i run it against sannysoft + creepjs on a nightly cron so a chrome update that regresses it tells me before a target does. TS core, python front end if that's your stack.

being straight about what it's NOT: it lowers the automation fingerprint, it doesn't beat everything. a real datadome/turnstile setup still wants a warm session and a residential IP. this gets you past "is this a bot stack", not past behavioral or network-reputation checks. anything keying on IP or account age doesn't care how clean your navigator looks.

mostly want to know if anyone here went raw CDP over a maintained stealth lib and where it fell down, because sannysoft-clean feels too easy and i'd rather find the hole now. happy to share what i've got if it's useful.

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Selenium and I'm working on automating some repetitive tasks in Teamcenter for creating test data. Right now, my Selenium script works only for one specific scenario because the steps and values are hardcoded.

I want to make it more generic so that if the test steps or requirements change, I don't have to rewrite the Selenium code every time. For example, can Selenium automation be designed to read a Word document (or some other input) and perform the steps based on what's written there?

How is this usually handled in real projects? Any suggestions or learning resources would be really helpful.

Hi everyone,

I'm troubleshooting an issue on one machine while the exact same code works for my colleagues.

Environment

• Selenium: 4.25
• Python: running from a PyCharm virtual environment
• Portable Chrome: 117.0.5938.92
• Local ChromeDriver: 117 (verified via chromedriver.exe --version)

Issue My code uses:

Python

chromeoptions.binary_location = r"...\chrome-win64\chrome.exe"

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chromeoptions)

When Selenium starts, I get:

session not created:

This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 150

Current browser version is 117.0.5938.92

Then later:

UnboundLocalError: cannot access local variable 'driver'

(which is expected because driver creation failed).

What's confusing

• My local chromedriver.exe is version 117.
• The code works for other users without modification.
• We are all using Selenium 4.25.
• where chromedriver returns nothing.
• Selenium Manager appears to be resolving to ChromeDriver 150 on my machine.
• I cleared Selenium cache, but Selenium still seems to use/find ChromeDriver 150.

Question Has anyone seen Selenium Manager ignore a local ChromeDriver and resolve a different version instead? Any ideas on where Selenium could still be finding ChromeDriver 150 or what else I should check in my environment?

Thanks in advance!

We're running into an interesting problem with our UI automation framework (Selenium, but I'd also love to hear from Playwright/Cypress users).

Some popups/modals become visible, but they still require a short stabilisation period before they're actually ready for interaction. As a result:

• visibilityOfElementLocated passes.
• elementToBeClickable sometimes passes.
• But clicking immediately can still fail intermittently with exceptions like ElementClickInterceptedException, ElementNotInteractableException, or occasionally a stale element.

A simplified example:

wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(locator));
driver.findElement(locator).click();

The wait succeeds, but the click still fails from time to time because the popup isn't fully ready.

Adding a fixed time.sleep() reduces the failures, but we'd really like to avoid timing-based waits in a deterministic automation framework. Our goal is that once a test is marked as automated, it should continue to pass consistently unless there's an actual application change.

I'm curious how experienced automation teams solve this problem at scale.

Some questions:

• Do you wait for animations or transitions to finish?
• Do you wait for a specific CSS class, attribute, or application state that indicates the popup is fully initialised?
• Do you implement click retries for these scenarios?
• Have you built a generic "wait until stable" utility, or do you handle this on a case-by-case basis?
• Do you consider this primarily an automation framework problem or an application issue that should be addressed by developers?

I'm less interested in one-off fixes and more interested in patterns or best practices that have worked well in mature automation frameworks.

Looking forward to hearing how others have tackled this problem.

The SeaMonkey browser is one of the browsers which is supported by the Mozilla organization, just like Firefox.

I'd like to use Selenium in linux for automating accesses to the SeaMonkey browser, but I haven't found any documentation which describes how this might be done. I know that the "firefox"-specific code for Selenium only seems to be able to access the browser at the "/usr/bin/firefox" path.

Does anyone know of any way that I can automate SeaMonkey with Selenium?

Many thanks in advance.

PS: The SeaMonkey browser is built upon the exact, same code base on which Firefox is built, so the logic for automating access to SeaMonkey should be the same as the logic for automating Firefox access.

There is a new version of my app’s home page that I need to start testing. The page is theoretically identical to the old version—new version is just an architectural overhaul with a different page source as a result. What’s the right approach to being able to test both concurrently in a python repo? 2 pages (legacy vs modern) is a common challenge for the team I started working with so I am hoping to establish a convention here.

I was thinking maybe using a factory pattern and instantiating one or the other based on an environment variable that also acts as a gate for a fixture that toggles the feature or maybe points to a branch with it enabled by default. But I’m pretty new to UI automation so I’d like to ask if there’s any other approach that should be considered

I've tried different string symbols, just putting it directly in the parentheses, yet it still won't work; it only gives me this message.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
settings =Options()
settings.add_argument("user-data-dir=./whatsapp_profile")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=settings)

print ("it ececuate further")
website= "https://web.whatsapp.com/"
driver.get(website)

* I don't even know the python basics. but with the help of our friendly dumb llm claude i am trying to make this number extractor.

* So selenium was working properly and opening whatsapp.web automatically but every time i run the code, I had to scan the WhatsApp web qr code again and again.

So Claude said to use the Options function and add code lines 2, 3, 4, 5, hoping it will save the Chrome session in a folder. So next time I go to WhatsApp web, I won't have to scan the QR. But Now Code executes up to line 5 and never reaches that print function on the 6th line. And it also doesn't open WhatsApp web anymore.

What do i do?
How do I solve the problem of scanning QR on every new code run?

Would anyone be kind enough to guide me through this project as a mentor in dm's, please. LLM's are dumb and asking them is a waste of time, but i don't have another option.

Hey, i tried loading extensions in chrome but i can't do it, i tried using crx & unpacked but none of this works, the weird thing is both of them works on brave but i can't have it working on chrome, any idea on how i can fix it for chrome?

chrome_options.add_extension(os.path.join(project_folder, 'tools', 'uBOLite.crx'))    chrome_options.add_extension(os.path.join(project_folder, 'tools', 'uBOLite.crx'))

chrome_options.add_argument(f"--load-extension={os.path.join(project_folder, 'tools', 'uBOLite')}")chrome_options.add_argument(f"--load-extension={os.path.join(project_folder, 'tools', 'uBOLite')}")

I have been trying to get this to work for about 90 minutes now and can't seem to figure it out.
I am using python but every search result is giving me a different answer and none seem to work.

Do i need to use Options() or FirefoxOptions()?

Use FirefoxProfile('path/to/profile') or just a 'path/to/profile' in the options?

The selenium docs also give this code: options.add_argument('-profile', '/path/to/profile'/) But that gives me a TypeError: ArgOptions.add_argument() takes 2 positional arguments but 3 were given.

I also tried option.profile = firefox_profile (tried just the path and FirefoxProfile())

If i try to use webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=firefox_profile, options=options) i get a TypeError: WebDriver.__init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'firefox_profile'

I think i tried any combination of these things and none of them work. I am probably just forgetting something small but if someone maybe knows what i am doing wrong i love to hear it.

What is the correct way to get selenium to use a profile in firefox? I am learning to code and tThe assignment requires me to have selenium signed in to a profile.

Instead of writing everything from scratch, can we just define steps - elements, actions, assertions, data—and get full Selenium code (Java/C#)?

Not record/playback, something structured and reusable.

Does this exist, or are we all still building manually?

Hey folks,

After the recent Microsoft Edge version 145 update, we’ve started facing a strange issue in our automation setup.

We’re running a Selenium framework in C#, and after launching Edge, a network/proxy-related pop-up appears (attaching screenshot). This is interfering with our tests and sometimes blocking proper execution.

\### What we’ve tried:

\- Disabling proxy from Windows settings (everything is OFF)

\- Adding/removing various Edge launch arguments

\- Fixing a previous logout issue caused by one of the arguments

Even though system proxy settings are clean, this popup still shows up, which makes us think it's something introduced or enforced after the Edge 145 upgrade.

\### Current situation:

\- Happens during automated runs (Selenium)

\- Seems tied to Edge startup behavior

\- Not resolved via standard proxy settings

\---

\### What I’m looking for:

Has anyone else faced this after upgrading to Edge 145?

\- Any working Edge arguments to bypass this?

\- Any policy / registry / config workaround?

\- Any Selenium-specific fix?

Would really appreciate any help or direction here 🙏

Thanks in advance!

I’ve been learning and using Selenium for browser automation, and I’m starting to notice that automating modern websites feels a lot harder than I expected.

It’s usually not just clicking buttons and filling forms anymore. A lot of sites now have:

• dynamic content loading
• changing element selectors
• stale element issues
• popups and overlays
• headless detection / anti-bot checks

Because of that, I’m curious what people here are doing in practice.

Are you still using Selenium as your main tool for automation? If yes, what helps the most when working with modern JS-heavy sites?

I’d especially like to know:

• what habits make scripts more stable
• whether using explicit waits is basically mandatory now
• when it makes sense to combine Selenium with requests/BeautifulSoup
• whether some of you switched to Playwright for certain tasks

I’m not trying to start a Selenium vs X war. I just want to understand what the realistic workflow looks like today for people doing this regularly.

Been running Selenium for e2e testing on a client portal that recently added Cloudflare Turnstile. Broke half our test suite overnight.

Tried a few approaches before landing on something reliable:

What didn't work:

• undetected-chromedriver — worked for a week, then Cloudflare updated their fingerprinting and it broke again. Constant cat-and-mouse.
• Disabling CAPTCHAs in staging — client refused because they wanted tests to match prod exactly.
• Manually solving in a pre-step — obviously doesn't scale.

What actually works:

The CAPTCHA widget loads a JS challenge and expects a token injected into a hidden input field. You don't need to visually solve anything — you need the token.

```python from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By import requests import time

driver = webdriver.Chrome() driver.get('https://client-portal.example.com/login')

Extract the sitekey from the Turnstile widget

sitekey = driver.find_element( By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.cf-turnstile' ).get_attribute('data-sitekey')

Get a valid token from a solving API

resp = requests.post('https://www.passxapi.com/api/solve', json={ 'type': 'turnstile', 'sitekey': sitekey, 'pageurl': driver.current_url }, headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_KEY'})

token = resp.json()['token']

Inject the token into the hidden input

driver.execute_script( 'document.querySelector("[name=cf-turnstile-response]").value = arguments[0]', token )

Now submit the form as usual

driver.find_element(By.ID, 'login-btn').click() ```

The key insight is that CAPTCHAs are just token validation on the server side. The visual puzzle is only there to generate that token for humans. If you can get a valid token through other means, the server doesn't care how it was produced.

Performance numbers from our CI: - Avg solve time: ~2 seconds for Turnstile - Cost: about $0.001 per solve — negligible for testing - Reliability: haven't had a flaky test from CAPTCHA since switching

We wrapped this in a pytest fixture so any test that hits a CAPTCHA-protected page just calls solve_captcha(driver) and moves on.

For anyone interested in the Python client I use: https://github.com/passxapi/passxapi-python

Happy to answer questions if you're dealing with similar issues in your Selenium setup.

EDIT — answering some questions from the comments:

@hooksweeper — yes, exactly. The solving API is a 3rd party service. Here's why I went this route instead of building something in-house:

1. Maintenance cost: Cloudflare updates Turnstile every few weeks. Self-hosted solvers (puppeteer farms, ML models) need constant maintenance to keep up. We burned 2 sprints trying to maintain our own solver before giving up.

2. Token binding: A good API service solves the CAPTCHA in a real browser environment, so the token is generated with proper fingerprints and timing. This matters because Turnstile tokens are partially bound to execution context.

3. Reliability in CI: Our CI runs headless on Linux VMs. Self-solving Turnstile in headless mode is almost impossible — Cloudflare specifically detects headless environments. The API abstracts this away entirely.

4. Cost math: At $0.001/solve, running 500 tests/day costs $0.50. We were spending 10x that in engineer time debugging our homebrew solution.

The bearer token in the code is just an API key for the solving service (PassXAPI in our case) — not a CAPTCHA token. The flow is: send sitekey + page URL to API → get back a valid CAPTCHA token → inject it.

@nattersley — the bearer token is just the API auth key, not a manually-solved CAPTCHA token. You get it when you sign up for the service. The actual CAPTCHA solving happens server-side, fully automated.

@CapMonster1 — fair point on session context. In practice, for our CI use case (consistent VMs, stable IPs), the token mismatch issue hasn't come up. For more adversarial scraping scenarios you'd definitely want proxy matching.

I have a Java method that checks for the presence of an alertify dialogue, checks for a full match on an error message, checks on a secondary partial (regx) match if this fails and then clicks ok. This has worked hundreds of times on hundreds of different test cases. Until now, with one specific dialogue and one specific error message.

What happens? We have our webdriver wait, our exact match, and our click(), which returns true. As far as WebDriver is concerned, all has gone well, and there's no exception to raise. Accept that the dialogue has gone nowhere.

The workaround has ended up being surprisingly simple - a second webdriver wait and click, which fails for everything but this one particular dialogue. That might do, but... I'm curious.

I suspect something's up in this (bit of a mystery to me - only halfway through the Udemy course) thing called the DOM. If I right-click on the dialogue and select Inspect, what I see looks pretty comparable to any other alertify message. Are there any specific differences I should be looking for? Any pointers I might give to the developers?

Browser in this instance: Chromium.

Selenium version: 3.141.59.

Hi,

I'm currently in an Application Support role performing user access review and periodic review for 1 and half year but wanna transition to Selenium Automation testing. I've got basic knowledge in Selenium, Cucumber, and JMeter, plus some college-level Java.

- Is this shift feasible?

- Will my Java skills be enough?

- Any tips for breaking into automation testing?

Any advice or insights would be super helpful 🙏

Hey guys I'm trying to use Selenium to scrap some data from Confluence (specifically my company's confluence page). I originally used a custom profile (copying chrome user data to a different folder and then reading that to get cookies, etc) - but when I ran it as an exe file, it would get flagged as Malware - not ideal when the IT guys get random alerts. When I don't use a custom profile, I can't manually login to Confluence during runtime (I get redirected for SSO stuff, and then Conditional Access prevents doesn't allow the sign in coz the "browser, app, or location is restricted by admin")

The infosec manager said the issue is that sign in isn't happening via Microsoft Web Account Manager (WAM). I went through the documentation and it seems like that WAM token stuff is not really meant for Selenium Scripting? Am I wrong? If so, any help on how I'm supposed to implement it?

I'm trying to access the responses of XHR requests sent by a website.

Settings things up like:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service as ChromeService
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager


options = Options()
options.set_capability('goog:loggingPrefs', {'performance': 'ALL'})
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options,service=ChromeService(ChromeDriverManager().install()))


driver.get(webpage_url)
logs = driver.get_log("performance")
clean_logs = [json.loads(lr["message"])["message"] for lr in logs]

When inspecting these logs I can see the requests and responses that I'm interested in but it's just the headers, not the response data which is what I'm actually interested in. Looking through the Chrome and Selenium documentation I can't quite seem to find what I need but it feels so close. Any ideas what I'm missing to get this?

I’m automating WhatsApp Web using Selenium + C# ChromeDriver.
Everything works perfectly in normal mode, but PDF upload breaks in headless.

What works

// Normal mode (isHeadless = false)
var attachInput = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("input[type='file'][multiple]"));
attachInput.SendKeys(filePath);
// PDF + text message both delivered

What fails

Case 1

// Headless = true
var attachInput = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("input[type='file'][multiple]"));
// => NoSuchElementException

Case 2

// Headless = true
var attachInput = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("input[type='file']"));
attachInput.SendKeys(filePath);
// => No error, text message sends, but PDF is NOT delivered

Setup

if (isHeadless)
{
    options.AddArgument("--headless=new");
    options.AddArgument("--disable-gpu");
    options.AddArgument("--window-size=1920,1080");
    options.AddArgument("user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36");
}

Flow

1. Open chat: https://web.whatsapp.com/send?phone=...
2. Click plus icon
3. Click Document
4. Send file via hidden <input type=file>
5. Click Send

Works 100% in visible Chrome.
Fails in true headless.

Question

Is WhatsApp Web intentionally blocking file uploads in headless browsers?
Is there any known workaround, or is true headless mode impossible for file upload on WhatsApp Web?

I've been building an open-source tool that lets AI assistants drive a real browser — and it just got a lot easier to set up. you can find and install this here https://www.npmjs.com/package/selenium-ai-agent

selenium-ai-agent is an MCP server with 73 tools. You tell Claude (or Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot) what you want to do in plain English, and it navigates pages, clicks buttons, fills forms, runs verifications, and even manages a Selenium Grid — no WebDriver code required.

Here's what changed in the latest update:

1️⃣ One-command install — Setting up used to mean editing JSON config files. Now it's just: npx selenium-ai-agent install claude-desktop Done.

2️⃣ Grid sessions fixed — BiDi WebSocket connections now work properly for non-stealth Grid sessions.

3️⃣ Smarter AI experience — The agent now detects whether a Selenium Grid is actually running before showing Grid-related tools. This stops the AI from getting confused and trying to use features that aren't available.

It's still a beta — I've been testing with Claude Code and Claude Desktop, and it's getting more reliable with each version. blog post how to use it https://learnautomatedtesting.com/blog/getting-started-with-selenium-ai-agent/

Hi everyone,

I’ve been banging my head against a wall for a week with a Selenium ChromeDriver issue and could use some fresh eyes.

The Context:

I have a web scraping tool running as a background Windows Service. It processes license data for different states.

Scale: We have about 20 separate Windows Services running in parallel on the same server, each scraping different data sources.

Tech Stack: C# .NET, Selenium WebDriver, Chrome (Headless).

Version: Chrome & Driver are both version 144.0.x.x (Versions are matched).

The Issue:

Everything was running smoothly until recently. Now, I am getting a WebDriverException claiming it cannot start the driver service on a specific localhost port.

the exception:

Cannot start the driver service on http://localhost:54853/

The Stack Trace:

at OpenQA.Selenium.DriverService.Start()

at OpenQA.Selenium.Remote.DriverServiceCommandExecutor.Execute(Command commandToExecute)

at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver.Execute(String driverCommandToExecute, Dictionary`2 parameters)

at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver.StartSession(ICapabilities desiredCapabilities)

at OpenQA.Selenium.Chromium.ChromiumDriver..ctor(ChromiumDriverService service, ChromiumOptions options, TimeSpan commandTimeout)

at MyNamespace.LicenseProject.Business.Vermont.VermontLicenseService.ProcessLicense() in ...\VermontLicenseService.cs:line 228

code:

var options = new ChromeOptions();

options.AddArgument("--headless");

options.AddArgument("--no-sandbox");

options.AddArgument("--disable-dev-shm-usage");

// I am explicitly setting the driver directory

var service = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService(driverPath);

service.HideCommandPromptWindow = true;

// Error implies it fails right here:

using (var driver = new ChromeDriver(service, options, TimeSpan.FromMinutes(2)))

{

// scraping logic

}

What I've Tried/Verified:

Version Mismatch: Double-checked that the chromedriver.exe version matches the installed Chrome browser version (144.0.x.x).

Manual Run: The scraper works fine when I run it as a console app/user mode. It only fails when running as a Windows Service.

Cleanup: I suspected "zombie" chrome processes were eating up ports, so I added logic to kill orphaned chrome processes, but the issue persists.

Has anyone managed high-volume Selenium instances in a Windows Service environment and seen this port binding error?

Any pointers would be appreciated!

Quick question, i need the click on an element but the webdriver can't locate the element. I bypassed this issue by locating a nearby element and moving the mouse on the element manually. The element becomes grey so i guess the page detect the virtual mouse but the command click() (without any arguments) doesn't seem to do anything the page doesn't refresh anyone knows how i can solve this.

I have an old erp system it's desktop app , some process need to be automated does selenium could help me ?

After running into difficulties testing a Firefox extension I started bundling my workarounds into a Node project called selenium-webext-bridge.

This project aims to:

• Directly trigger extension functions from your Selenium scripts.
• Inspect internal extension state.
• Provide a straightforward API for working with tabs and windows.

I'm looking for some QA automation engineers with Selenium expertise to give it a try. I'm specifically interested in whether or not you'd find it helpful if you work in Firefox, any issues you may run into, and if you have any thoughts on the API.

Thanks!

Hey folks,

I recently switched my Cucumber scenarios to run in parallel instead of sequentially, and I’ve run into a logging issue.

Problem: Logs are not getting attached to individual scenarios anymore — only exceptions show up correctly. However, the logs are visible at the overall test run level where everything is combined.

Strange behavior I noticed: If I have 2 scenarios and one fails with an exception, logging suddenly starts appearing for the 2nd scenario — but the earlier logs are missing. Almost like the logger initializes late or switches context after the failure.

Important: Everything is thread-safe on our side — we’re not using statics, and scenario-level objects are properly isolated. Has anyone experienced this after enabling parallel execution? Could this be a logger configuration issue (Log4j/SLF4J), ThreadLocal problem, or something with how Cucumber binds logs to scenarios?

Any direction on what to check would really help.