Since 2023, Google is providing Chrome For Testing flavors of its popular Chrome browser.
Chrome for Testing is a flavor of Chrome that is optimised for testing. It removes some features and adds some defaults that are intended to improve the speed and reliability of your browser tests.
Below are some of the features that are different from regular Chrome browsers.
Chrome For Testing: Auto Update disabled
Chrome for Testing disables the auto-update functionality of the browser. This is important, because you want to make sure that during your tests, you are testing on the browser version that you expect to be testing on.
You do not want to get in a situation where the browser suddenly decides to update itself in between two test runs.
Versioned browser binaries
If you want to automate Chrome, you need Chromedriver which is tied to a specific version of Chrome. Because the regular Chrome browser automatically updates, this might cause mismatches during testing with the Chromedriver that is being used.
To prevent this, Chrome for Testing provides builds of specific versions. This means you can choose the browser binary that is fully compatible with the Chromedriver you are using.
How to download Chrome for Testing
You can use the @puppeteer/browsers commandline utility which is provided by Puppeteer.
You can also specify a specific version of Chrome for Testing:
Or use the Chrome for Testing overview page.
Chromedriver download
You can also download Chromedriver with a command:
Or install Chromedriver from the Chrome for Testing availability page.
TestingBot provides access to real Chrome browsers and automatically configures these to use the correct Chromedriver. At this time we do not provide Chrome for Testing browsers as we believe it's better to test on the browsers that your customers are actually using.
