Bug: Selenium tests occasionally fails when using ChromeDriver versions > 128.

[Tomas-H]

Description

All Chrome and Chromium versions above 128 are currently unstable with Selenium due to issues with ChromeDriver.

The original bug is reported here: Chromium Issue 402796660
and is still unresolved.

The root cause is ChromeDriver — it sometimes fails to perform as expected, making Selenium unusable with newer Chrome/Chromium versions. (Tests work on the latest browsers with Playwright, cause there is no need for ChromeDriver)

I was not able to isolate this issue into a small, reproducible code snippet — it only occurs on real servers.

Therefore, I’ve created this repository with a real test so you can see exactly what’s happening.

https://github.com/Tomas-H/chromedriver-bug/tree/main

We want to continue automating tests with Selenium, but testing on the latest browsers is not possible at the moment.

In my opinion, this bug is clearly a ChromeDriver issue, but it has a major impact on Selenium, making it effectively unusable.

Please let me know if you need any more information — I’ll do my best to provide it.

Regards,
Tomas H.

Reproducible Code

Everything is described in the README.

We’ve tried this multiple times, and only once did the tests pass with the new Chrome version — but they failed again on the second run.

https://github.com/Tomas-H/chromedriver-bug/tree/main 

The main problem is happening here https://github.com/Tomas-H/chromedriver-bug/blob/main/test_browser_correctly_navigates.py#L78

[selenium-ci]

@Tomas-H, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

Selenium Triage Team: remember to follow the Triage Guide

[github-actions]

⚠️ You reported using Selenium version 4.27.1, but the latest release is 4.35.

Please verify that this issue still occurs with the latest version. If it no longer applies, you can close this issue or update your comment.

This issue will be marked "awaiting answer" and may be closed automatically if no response is received.

[Tomas-H]

I have tested this issue with Selenium 4.35.0 (the latest release) and the problem still occurs.

[diemol]

I understand your point, but if it is a ChromeDriver issue, I'm unsure what we can do about it.

[Tomas-H]

Unless more people report this directly in the Chromium/Chromedriver issue tracker, I’m afraid nothing will change. Right now this basically means the end of the road for anyone trying to use Selenium with Chrome/Chromium.
It would really help if more people added their voices so the issue becomes more visible to all involved parties — hopefully increasing the chance of a proper fix. If you have any contacts who can help raise this issue, please reach out to them. Beyond that, I’m not sure what more we can do.

[cgoldberg]

I just ran your code with Chrome 140, and I see the issue you are running into.

To summarize: you navigate to https://mojeid.cz/logout/, but the user is never logged out. The URL remains https://consumer.regtest.nic.cz/consumer/oic/list-clients/ instead of changing to https://mojeid.cz/auction/password/ within the timeout you specified.

When the test fails, I do see in DEBUG logs that chromedriver received the navigation request and responded successfully:

POST http://localhost:64773/session/57ef403647155dd06d20daa9e08fbd89/url {'url': 'https://mojeid.cz/logout/'}
http://localhost:64773 "POST /session/57ef403647155dd06d20daa9e08fbd89/url HTTP/1.1" 200 0
Remote response: status=200 | data={"value":null} | headers=HTTPHeaderDict({'Content-Length': '14', 'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8', 'cache-control': 'no-cache'})
Finished Request

However, it is unclear if this is an issue with Chrome/ChromeDriver or just an issue with your application. Either way, I don't think there is anything that we can do from Selenium's standpoint. We send the correct request to ChromeDriver. Whether or not Chrome does what you think it should is really out of our hands and would either need to be fixed by the Chromium team or yourself (if it's an application issue).

I am going to close this, since there is nothing for us to do... but at least we have it recorded in case someone else runs across this.