Bug: Detection of Chrome location on Linux fails in a specific case

[stanislaw]

Describe the bug

$ which chromium.chromedriver
/snap/bin/chromium.chromedriver

TBD: Get a browser location from a user. Apparently the webdriver_manager browser discovery code fails to find that specific browser location.

To Reproduce

–

Expected behavior

We expect all browser locations be discovered on Linux.

Screenshots

Environment

Additional context

[stanislaw]

/snap/bin/chromium
Ok! Should we continue exchanging in this ticket instead then ?

@MartyLake could you do the following steps on your system:

pip install pybrowsers
python
>>> import browsers
>>> print(list(browsers.browsers()))
# [... Do you see your Chrome browser here? ]

[MartyLake]

/tmp$ mkdir test
/tmp$ cd test
/tmp/test$ python3 -m venv python-venv
/tmp/test$ ./python-venv/bin/pip install pybrowsers
Collecting pybrowsers
  Downloading pybrowsers-0.9.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (8.0 kB)
Collecting pyxdg<0.29,>=0.27 (from pybrowsers)
  Downloading pyxdg-0.28-py2.py3-none-any.whl.metadata (567 bytes)
Downloading pybrowsers-0.9.0-py3-none-any.whl (9.0 kB)
Using cached pyxdg-0.28-py2.py3-none-any.whl (49 kB)
Installing collected packages: pyxdg, pybrowsers
Successfully installed pybrowsers-0.9.0 pyxdg-0.28
/tmp/test$ ./python-venv/bin/python
Python 3.12.3 (main, Feb  4 2025, 14:48:35) [GCC 13.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import browsers
>>> print(list(browsers.browsers()))
[{'browser_type': 'chromium', 'path': 'env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/chromium_chromium.desktop /snap/bin/chromium', 'display_name': 'Navigateur Web Chromium', 'version': '136.0.7103.59'}, {'browser_type': 'firefox', 'path': 'env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/firefox_firefox.desktop /snap/bin/firefox', 'display_name': 'Firefox', 'version': '137.0.2'}]

Hey, yes it does appear listed there.

[stanislaw]

@MartyLake, thanks for your input. There is one idea to improve the browser detection and that is to move from webdriver_manager library to the pybrowsers.

The webdriver_manager is not maintained actively, so it is unlikely that we can fix your Linux/Snap/Chrome with that library.

I know that you could make it work by providing a manual path, so while you are not blocked, I will take some time to consider whether we would actually move to pybrowsers.

[MartyLake]

Sounds good to me, thanks for taking a look @stanislaw !