chromedriver.exe和selenium-chrome-driver.jar之间的区别

Question

I want to know the difference between selenium-chrome-driver.jar and chromedriver.exe

My friend is able to get the chrome browser launched without specifying the location of chromedriver.exe in his script/chromedriver initialization, and she has mentioned selenium-chrome-driver.jar in pom.xml , does this make any difference. If so then how?

Answer 1

So selenium-chrome-driver.jar is more or less just a ZIP file that can consist of anything.

It would be best to reference the location of the chromedriver.exe to launch Chrome.

I believe there isn't much of a difference though if you wanted to use the .jar , you would need to extract selenium-chrome-driver.jar and reference the chromedriver.exe from within there.

Answer 2

First of all you need to understand how Selenium communicates with the browser.

When you write selenium tests, you write code in the language of your choice using the client code bindings. This code then talks to the relevant driver binary that is run inside the browser as a plugin using the JSON wire protocol.

So the interaction is:

Selenium has a client API which details all of the commands you can send over the JSON wire protocol, it then has a series of pieces of code that allow it to interact with specific driver binaries. So in your case the selenium-chrome-driver.jar has the code that is specifically used to interact with the chrome driver binary. If you were talking to the gecko driver binary, you would need to use selenium-firefox-driver.jar . Each driver binary that targets a specific browser has an associated jar that contains the code required to talk to the relevant driver binary.

For this to work you need all elements, so to be able to drive Google Chrome with Webdriver you will need to have the selenium-chrome-driver.jar and the chromedriver.exe binary.