Develop Reference

Selenium - start your normal chrome and not chromium

im looking example how can i start my normal google chrome in webdriver c#?
For now i use :
ChromeDriver driver;
public ChromeDriverService chromeDriverService;
chromeDriverService = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService();
chromeDriverService.HideCommandPromptWindow = true;
var chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
chromeOptions.AddArguments("disable-infobars");
chromeOptions.AddExcludedArgument("enable-automation");
chromeOptions.AddAdditionalCapability("useAutomationExtension", false);
driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeDriverService,chromeOptions);
But it run my chromedriver.exe installed inside project. Can i just run my simple installed chrome? Without download any chromedriver.exe? It's important for me , because some website check if there is opened chromium with chromedriver.exe.
Is it possible to do that?

If you want not just open it but also perform some interaction with your site then you have to deal with Selenium and WebDriver.
You can try Python and undetected-chromedriver which has some workarounds preventing some systems to detect that your browser is running under webdriver control.

Unfortunately, it's the chromedriver.exe that lets you interact with Chrome so, without the driver, you wouldn't be able to interact with the actual browser.
If your issue is with chromium, try driving Mozilla with GeckoDriver

Selenium always uses chromedriver.exe for interacting with Chrome, I think you mean you want to load your default data directory. You can add a chrome option for this purpose:
chromeOptions.AddArguments(#"C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data")
Take care, any other chrome must not be running that time with the same data directory. Like you may have run for your personal use.
You can also create a data directory somewhere else if you just want to show some realistic behavior to a website. But some websites are smart enough so it does not work every time.

How to switch tabs in Selenium without focusing the window

I'm using the C# Selenium and Edge webdriver on Windows 10. Below is my code for switch between tab.
public class BrowserTest
{
private readonly EdgeDriver driver;
public BrowserTest()
{
EdgeDriverService service = EdgeDriverService.CreateDefaultService(configuration[DriverPathKey]);
service.SuppressInitialDiagnosticInformation = true;
service.HideCommandPromptWindow = true;
driver = new EdgeDriver(service, new EdgeOptions()
{
PageLoadStrategy = PageLoadStrategy.Default,
});
}
public void OpenGoogleAndDuckduckgo()
{
driver.Url = "https://google.com/";
driver.ExecuteScript("window.open();");
driver.SwitchTo().Window(driver.WindowHandles.Last()); // This line lead to Edge focusing
driver.Url = "https://duckduckgo.com/";
}
}
But seem it focusing Edge browser that taking me away from checking my e-mail or etc.
How can I get Selenium to "silently" focus on a new tab (or window etc) so I can do something while my code runs?
P/s: I tried for headless mode but I need to manual input credentials to login so I need a UI. Or if there a way to turn from window mode to headless mode in runtime?

You can not achieve that (change focus without focus) in Selenium. If you are running Selenium tests, just use different machine. HW or virtual.
Headless mode of browser is not a good solution also. Sooner or later you will have too much problems to solve with differences between normal mode and headless mode.
Avoiding captcha is very hard in automation mode of browser. You need AI to solve captcha in that mode and it is even not guaranteed it will works (depends on captcha and server protection).
If you need to test or grab some pages which has this protection you have to use different approach: Write addon for browser (javascript app) and run it in regular mode of browser.

I think you should use the same code but consider deploying your script in VM. with that you can continue to do your stuff in your local wherein your selenium code will get executed in Virtual machine (With your own OS setup )
Oracle VM virtual Box provides very feasible solution with respect to virtual machines. Check out their official web sites linked. They have different distribution for MacOS, Linux and Windows operating system.

Geckodriver 0.16.0 start firefox with flashplayer

Since geckodriver v0.16.0 flashplayer is disabled by default.
Is there any possibility to start firefox with enabled flashplayer?
I'm using C#. My code right now:
var profileManager = new FirefoxProfileManager();
FirefoxProfile profile = profileManager.GetProfile("selenium"); //created firefox user named selenium
profile.SetPreference("plugin.state.flash", 1);
Code bellow doesn't work for me:
profile.SetPreference("dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.libflashplayer.so", true);
When I use this one:
profile.SetPreference("plugin.state.flash", 1);
firefox is asking if I want to enable flashplayer, and than refreshes page (with all inputs filled previously - so i got empty fields).
If I select "allow and remember", next time I start this code nothig is saved. I'm getting the same situation.

I found solution there:
How to enable Adobe Flash in FireFox Selenium webdriver with FirefoxProfile
If I replaced profile.setPreference("plugin.state.flash", 1); to profile.setPreference("plugin.state.flash", 2); it stopped to asking me if I want to enable flash player.

Here is the solution for you:
With Selenium 4.3.0, gecko driver v0.16.0 & Mozilla Firefox 53.0 this code works well with myfreecams.com.
It is worth mentioning that the default Firefox profile is not very automation friendly. When you want to run automation reliably on a Firefox browser it is advisable to make a separate profile. Automation profile should be light to load and have special proxy and other settings to run good test. You should be consistent with the profile you use on all development and test execution machines. If you used different profiles everywhere, the SSL certificates you accepted or the plug-ins you installed would be different and that would make the tests behave differently on the machines.
So, Create a New Firefox profile and use the same in the Test script involves three steps process. First you need to Start the Profile Manager, second is to Create a New Profile and third is to use the same profile in Test scripts. Let's assume we created a new FirefoxProfile by the name "debanjan".
Use the following code to open http://www.myfreecams.com/ with your new FirefoxProfile "debanjan":
String driverPath = "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\";
//Mozila Firefox
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", driverPath+"geckodriver.exe");
ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
FirefoxProfile testprofile = profile.getProfile("debanjan");
DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
dc.setCapability(FirefoxDriver.PROFILE, testprofile);
FirefoxDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(dc);
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10,TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.navigate().to("http://www.myfreecams.com/");
PS: This code is in Java so you may have to convert it into C# format.
Let me know, if this helps you.

Selenium, how to take screenshot without opening the browser?

I want to take a screenshot of a webpage using Selenium.
I have notice that the action to take the screenshot require to open the web browser itself.
tried to change webDriver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com"); with webDriver.Url = "http://www.google.com"; but no success,
I even tried to leave it with no url and the browser opened with url of 'data', which now I understand that something else makes the browser to be open.
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var capabilitiesInternet = new
OpenQA.Selenium.Remote.DesiredCapabilities();
capabilitiesInternet.
SetCapability("ignoreProtectedModeSettings", true);
IWebDriver webDriver = new ChromeDriver();
webDriver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com");
Screenshot screenshot = ((ITakesScreenshot)webDriver).GetScreenshot();
screenshot.SaveAsFile("E:\\ScreenShot.png",
System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png);
webDriver.Quit();
}

No - you need to let the WebDriver request the page, otherwise how can it know what screenshot to produce?
If you're trying to avoid a real, 'slow' browser starting up and opening a window, you should either consider running that browser headlessly, as per:
How do I run Selenium in Xvfb?
Or check out the headless WebKit browser PhantomJS (or maybe SlimerJS), and using almost exactly the same WebDriver API as you have now, ask it to produce your screenshots 'in-memory':
Phantomjs - take screenshot of a web page
Just replace:
WebDriver webDriver = new ChromeDriver();
with:
WebDriver webDriver = new PhantomJSDriver();
(Obviously requires the application to be installed locally)
Edit: Just a note that the typical use-case for this is 'overnight' continuous-integration / continuous-testing when run from headless CI servers. However, it can be very easily added to other work-flows, e.g. for visual regression-testing, and simple one-off checks.

There's multiple ways to go about it:
There is chrome flag --no-startup-window which should open chrome without window. I tried it, and it didn't work, however, you can give it a go.
Use hacks - there is a way to start chrome without you ever seeing it, it works nicely. Just use --window-position=-9999,0, note that, TakeScreenShot() has some weird anomalies in my experience - it focuses the window, it runs out of memory randomly, etc. What I ended up doing is I wrote chrome extension which can take screenshots and return them back to selenium through JS.

Custom browser preferences for file download

While using Selenium WebDriver as web automation framework, I have a question -
how can I configure Google Chrome and Internet Explorer to save downloaded files to specific (not default) folder and also without showing additional "save file" windows.
Webdriver has a FirefoxProfile for Mozilla Firefox browser, but what about other browsers?
Example for Firefox :
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.SetPreference("browser.helperApps.alwaysAsk.force", false);
profile.SetPreference("browser.download.folderList", 2);
profile.SetPreference("browser.download.dir", "\\Somedir\");
profile.SetPreference("services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", false);
profile.SetPreference("browser.download.useDownloadDir", true);
profile.SetPreference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk", "application/zip, application/x-gzip");

With Chrome, it can be done, it is just not as easy and straightforward as Firefox profile manipulation is.
Since the WebDriver bindings expose the ability to add in 'custom' abilities and command line parameters, you can give it any of the command line switches that Chrome knows about:
http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/
With this, we can give Chrome a profile to load, just as you do with Firefox.
However the WebDriver bindings don't expose the options as well as the Firefox profiles. So it has to be done manually.
Firstly, find out where your profiles live:
Go to this URL in Chrome.
chrome://version/
It will tell you what profile it's currently loading (and what command switches it is using). Copy the Profile Path into Explorer and go to it.
It should be, by default, using the Default profile directory. Go up on level in explorer, so you sit in the User Data folder.
Next step, create a new profile for Selenium to use. Open Chrome, go to Settings > Users > Add a new user. Give it a name.
Once created, Chrome will open up a new Chrome window for that user. Next step is to force Chrome, for this user only, to save downloads in a certain place.
This can be done either two ways. In the Chrome UI, go to the Settings, and change the download directory and ensure the checkbox next to it is unchecked, or to get a little more creative...
All Chrome preferences are stored in a file, stored in the users directory. You should have an explorer window open already, sitting at the User Data folder in Chrome's user folder. You should hopefully see it's created a new profile (probably called Profile 1). Go into it.
Now look for a file called Preferences (no extension).
Edit it with Notepad (it's a text document, with JSON).
Look for the download section, it will look like this:
"download": {
"directory_upgrade": true,
"extensions_to_open": ""
},
Add in this key, putting in the path you want to save your files to:
"default_directory": "PATH",
Make sure you escape any slashes in the path, with another backslash, in the same way it is escaped when you use the Visual Studio debugger.
For instance, C:\Bob\Jim\Downloads should be input as C:\\Bob\\Jim\\Downloads.
Save this file.
Now you have a profile where the downloads go to a certain place. How to make Chrome use this profile? You tell it which profile to open up at launch. The command line would be:
--profile-directory="Profile 1"
(Replace Profile 1 with whatever it is called in the User Data folder, if it isn't called that).
OK, we can tell Chrome to load up a particular profile, but how do we tell Selenium to do this too? Easy! Add it in as an 'additional command line switch'.
var chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
chromeOptions.AddArgument(#"--profile-directory=""Profile 1""");
Selenium will take care on ensuring that command line switch is passed down to Chrome.
(Note: if anyone knows of an easier solution, let me know!).
As for IE, I have tested this on IE8 and IE9 and it works OK. IE can take into consideration a registry key for where the default downloads location is. I cannot comment on IE7 or below though.
Navigate to, using regedit to (it is a per Windows user settings):
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer
Add in a string value called Download Directory. It's value will be the exact location of where you want the downloads to go. No need to escape the path BTW.
Simply ensure the user you are logged into under Windows has set this value, and there will be no more setup needed.

Please try the below code for chrome. Even I'm looking for a similar option for IE.
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/path/to/chromedriver");
String downloadFilepath = "/path/to/download";
HashMap<String, Object> chromePrefs = new HashMap<String, Object>();
chromePrefs.put("profile.default_content_settings.popups", 0);
chromePrefs.put("download.default_directory", downloadFilepath);
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
HashMap<String, Object> chromeOptionsMap = new HashMap<String, Object>();
options.setExperimentalOptions("prefs", chromePrefs);
options.addArguments("--test-type");
DesiredCapabilities cap = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
cap.setCapability(ChromeOptions.CAPABILITY, chromeOptionsMap);
cap.setCapability(CapabilityType.ACCEPT_SSL_CERTS, true);
cap.setCapability(ChromeOptions.CAPABILITY, options);
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(cap);