Freely test web-apps

ChromeDriver is a free development tool that enables you to automatically test the web apps that you’re developing across many browsers. This open-source utility grants you the capability to freely navigate web pages, user input, JavaScript execution, and so much more.  

It is a standalone server that implements the W3C WebDriver standard—a remote-controlled interface that allows introspection and control of user agents. This specific WebDriver also offers a platform- and language-neutral wire protocol for Chromium. Depending on your website’s need, you can opt to get either its beta or stable file version. 

What is a ChromeDriver?

ChromeDriver is a special executable program also utilized by Selenium WebDriver to administer Chrome. Thus, before beginning your webpage tests, you must ensure first that Chromium or Google Chrome browsers are installed in a recognized location so the development kit can easily locate it. Once guaranteed that both the web development tool and web browsers are installed, you can proceed to help the WebDriver in finding the downloaded file. 

You can look for it in three various ways. The first and universal method is including the program’s location in your PATH environment variable. For Java-specific programming languages, you can specify its location through the webdriver.chrome.driver system property while for Python, you should incorporate the path to the software package when installing webdriver.Chrome. This WebDriver bundle starts the server process at creation and terminates it when quit is mentioned. 

Although for large test suites where an instance is made per test, it can bring you some drawbacks as a significant amount of time can be wasted in processing all elements. To prevent this, you can make use of the ChromeDriverService empowering you to start/stop the server by yourself. Another technique is opening the server separately before running any tests and utilizing the Remote WebDriver to connect.

Tests web-apps across various browsers

ChromeDriver is efficient and effective to evaluate the performance of the web application you’re formulating. Providing you the capability to automatically run tests toward your websites across tons of web browsers supported, it is an excellent service to rely upon. Explore through your pages, user input, JavaScript operation, etc. Double-check every corner to make sure that everything performs accordingly and seamlessly when it goes live.