Locally and at our CI pipeline we have different versions of chrome and the chrome version in our CI environment is not easily updateable because it is shared by several teams.
I was searching for an webdriver-manager option to install the best matching chrome driver for the currently installed chrome, but did not found any.
Providing a fixed version is not much better, because I would need a different version regarding the environment and it could easily fail if the chrome version is updated, which is unintended.
I also tried to enforce protractor to use the version from node-chromedriver (using "chromeDriver" option worked half way) and prevent protractor to download the newest version via webdriver-manager, but was unsuccessful.
So my suggestion is to provide an option to install the chrome driver which fits best.
IMHO providing an option in webdriver-manager would solve the root cause, could reduce the amount of github issues regarding incompatible version matches and reduce the need to provide a fixed version.
Locally and at our CI pipeline we have different versions of chrome and the chrome version in our CI environment is not easily updateable because it is shared by several teams.
So my suggestion is to provide an option to install the chrome driver which fits best.
With https://github.com/testimio/chrome-version there is a solution to get the currently installed chrome version for all three platforms. And in node-chromedriver there is already a solution (https://github.com/giggio/node-chromedriver/blob/2afecb47d212c2cd6633e0f81bfc651b5d61b3f4/install.js#L38-L44), which installs the matching chrome driver.
IMHO providing an option in webdriver-manager would solve the root cause, could reduce the amount of github issues regarding incompatible version matches and reduce the need to provide a fixed version.