[🐛 Bug]: Inconsistent shutdown behavior between drivers

[jeetjddas]

What happened?

I was trying to use the new feature Selenium Manager using Edge browser Unfortunately, after every successful run of the program, the browser gets automatically closed

Language: Python Editor: Pycharm

Note: Firefox browser is working fine till now.

How can we reproduce the issue?

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Edge()
driver.get("https://www.google.com/")

Relevant log output

It ran successfully, so there is no log to show from the console.

Operating System

Windows 10 pro

Selenium version

Selenium 4.6.0

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

Microsoft Edge 107.0.1418.56

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

No driver has been used

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No

[github-actions[bot]]

@jeetjddas, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[titusfortner]

The browser is supposed to close when the program finishes running. You can keep it open on Chrome & Edge drivers by passing in an Options instance and setting detach = True

[jeetjddas]

But if I use Firefox, without using Options instance, the browser remains open. Only in case of Chrome and Edge, the browser is getting closed automatically if I am not using Options instance and setting detach = True. Is it a valid deviation? @titusfortner

[titusfortner]

Nope, that's a bug. I can duplicate it. Thanks for reporting.

[titusfortner]

Did a run through of existing behaviors of different languages:

• Ruby - ensures all drivers are quit with #at_exit; drivers are attached to a process group, which we think also closes all processes opened by the driver, so browsers exit as well.
• Python - ensures all drivers are quit with __del__(), but browsers remain open
• Java - does not close anything at program complete
• .NET - does not close anything at program complete
• JS - (unknown)

Ideally the behavior is the same between languages and browsers, let's discuss at next TLC meeting.

[diemol]

Was this discussed?

[titusfortner]

A little in the channel. It was added right after the last tlc meeting.

[titusfortner]

It was discussed at TLC Meeting - https://www.selenium.dev/meetings/2022/tlc-12-08/#proposalsdecisions

It was agreed that ending the processes for everything on program exit would be ideal, but that because of backwards compatibility issues we would need bandwidth to do the work and field questions from irate users, which is not currently a priority.

The easiest way to deal with irate users would be to point out the alternative for maintaining current behavior (browsers stay open when program exits. Chrome/Edge support this with the detach option, but Mozilla does not. So this issue is essentially pending: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/issues/595

[titusfortner]

Mozilla is not prioritizing that feature. I think this might be worth doing regardless.

At the very least we should be killing the driver process, even if that doesn't/won't kill the browser process.

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[github-actions[bot]]

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