Are selenium browser drivers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, etc) for node.js compiled OS arch or for actual PC processor arch or installed OS arch?

Question

Reading about Node.js's os.arch() , it says:
returns the operating system CPU architecture for which the Node.js binary was compiled. Possible values are 'arm', 'arm64', 'ia32', 'mips', 'mipsel', 'ppc', 'ppc64', 's390', 's390x', 'x32', and 'x64'.

Reading this issue https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/17036 stipulates that os.arch() returns the architecture of the Node.js process, not the operating system.

When considering downloading selenium browser drivers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, etc), are we to consider the node.js compiled OS architecture or for actual PC installed OS architecture ?

Example:
Should I download chromedriver_win32.zip for a Node.js compiled for x32 arch (Even if this node is installed on a 64bit OS) or for the installed 32bit Windows OS?

Answer 1

You can download executable that is compatible with your operating system. Webdriver itself and programming language bindings are independent. As per WebDriver w3c specification:

WebDriver remote ends must provide an HTTP compliant wire protocol where the endpoints map to different commands.

So that webdriver exposes HTTP-compliant protocol which decouples your particular binding implementation from implementation of webdriver.