Other Browsers

The Chromium driver theoretically supports automating any Chromium-based browser, not just Chrome and Edge.

Warning

Other browsers may not be fully compatible with the Chromium driver. They may require additional workarounds not listed in this guide, or may not support chromedriver at all (e.g. Vivaldi).

Configuration

Usually, no configuration is required in the browser itself. The main differences from regular Chrome/Edge are in the required capabilities:

• The target browser must be specified by customizing the path to the browser binary, using the goog:chromeOptions capability
• Most browsers will require the appium:executable capability in order to specify a compatible chromedriver binary
  • The browser's Chromium version can usually be found in its About page. You can then download a compatible chromedriver binary either manually or using the install-chromedriver driver script. Note that there may not always be a binary with the exact same version as Chromium, but the closest match should still work.

Background

For browsers like Chrome and Edge, the Chromium driver can automatically verify version compatibility with chromedriver/edgedriver, since the browser and driver binaries are released by the same vendor, and both have matching major versions. But for other browsers, the browser version will likely be different from the bundled Chromium version.

The way that the Chromium driver detects the browser version is by simply executing the browser binary with the --version flag (on Windows this approach is slightly more complex). If the major version in this returned value is different from the internal Chromium version, then the Chromium driver will simply download an incompatible chromedriver version, and session creation will fail. The way to solve this problem is to explicitly provide a path to a compatible chromedriver binary.

Examples

The Opera browser does not expose its Chromium version, so the chromedriver path must be provided. The following capabilities can be used to launch Opera on macOS:

{
  "platformName": "mac",
  "appium:automationName": "Chromium",
  "appium:executable": "/path/to/compatible/chromedriver",
  "goog:chromeOptions": {
    "binary": "/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera"
  }
}

Info

Opera also maintains its own OperaChromiumDriver, which may provide better compatibility than standard ChromeDriver.

The Brave browser uses a custom approach and exposes both Chromium's and its own version (e.g. Brave 1.91.180 bundles Chromium 149, returning version 149.1.91.180). In practice this means that the chromedriver path can be omitted. The following capabilities can be used to launch Brave on macOS:

{
  "platformName": "mac",
  "appium:automationName": "Chromium",
  "goog:chromeOptions": {
    "binary": "/Applications/Brave Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave Browser"
  }
}