We can install Selenium on Mac OS. We shall take the help of Homebrew package manager for installation in Mac OS. Let us follow the step by step process −. Install Selenium by running the command −. Pip install selenium. Install the Chrome driver with the homebrew by running the command −. Brew cask install chromedriver. WebDriver is an open source tool for automated testing of webapps across many browsers. It provides capabilities for navigating to web pages, user input, JavaScript execution, and more. ChromeDriver is a standalone server that implements the W3C WebDriver standard. ChromeDriver is available for Chrome on Android and Chrome on Desktop (Mac.
In our previous article on Selenium Tutorial, you learned how to download selenium webdriver and junit jar files. In this article, we will provide the detailed steps on how you can download selenium chrome driver.
Before we start with the download process, let us try to get some basic understanding on what chrome driver is and why do we need it.
What is chrome driver?
You know that selenium is a tool that basically interacts with browsers to test your web applications. In our previous article, we had mentioned that you can use selenium webdriver to open some url on a browser and interact with webpage elements like buttons, links, text boxes etc.
But selenium cannot do all these tasks on its own. It needs some help from the browser side as well, to perform all these tasks. So, in that sense, chrome driver is what helps selenium perform these actions on Chrome browser. In more technical terms, ChromeDriver is a standalone server which implements WebDriver’s wire protocol for Chrome.
Like chrome driver, are there more standalone servers for other browsers as well?
Yes. Just like chrome driver, there are multiple other standalone servers as well. Some popular ones are GeckoDriver for firefox, EdgeDriver for Microsoft Edge, InternerExplorerDriver for IE, SafariDriver for Safari browser and so on.
You will need to use these drivers when you want to run your automation scripts on their corresponding browsers.
Why have we selected chrome driver for this tutorial and not others?
This question can be rephrased like this – Why are we using chrome browser to automate our test cases? There are two main reasons for this:
- Chrome has the highest market share worldwide. So, it makes sense to work on the browser which majority of the people are using. We have given below a comparison chart of different browsers.
- Selenium works better in Chrome than other browsers, especially Firefox. When I started working on Selenium automation in 2012 Firefox was kind of the default browser to go to when people wanted to automate test scripts. But now a lot of people prefer to use chrome to write automation scripts.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share
Let us now check out the steps to download ChromeDriver.
Install Selenium Webdriver
Steps to download ChromeDriver
Follow the steps given below to download the latest version of chrome driver for selenium –
1. Open ChromeDriver download page – https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
Selenium Software Download
2. This page contains all the versions of Selenium ChromeDriver. We are interested in the latest version of ChromeDriver, which is ChromeDriver 2.39 (as on 07 Jun 2018), as shown in the below image.
3. Click on ChromeDriver 2.39 link. You will be navigated to ChromeDriver download page which contains ChromeDriver for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.
4. Click on chromedriver_win32.zip to download ChromeDriver for Windows.
5. Once you download the zip file, unzip it to retrieve chromedriver.exe
Selenium Webdriver Download Chrome
With this, we complete the download process for ChromeDriver. In our next article, we will focus on creating a selenium project in Eclipse, where we will use this chrome driver and the jar files that we downloaded in the previous article.