selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 80

Question

when i go to command prompt and type chromedriver -v:

ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.36 (3582db32b33893869b8c1339e8f4d9ed1816f143-refs/branch-heads/3945@{#614})

but when i try to run this code :

from selenium import webdriver 
class InstaBot:
    def __init__(self):
        self.driver=webdriver.Chrome()
        self.driver.get("www.instagram.com")
InstaBot()

it gives me error like this: raise exception_class(message, screen, stacktrace)

selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 80

why this is happening i tried to remove selenium as well as chromedriver and reinstall of version 79.0.3945 but when i run it ,it show this can only be run on version 80 my chrome version is 79.0.3945 which is lastest ,and version 80 chrome is chrome beta

Answer 1

This error message...

selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 80

...implies that the ChromeDriver v80.0 was unable to initiate/spawn a new Browsing Context i.e. Chrome Browser session.

---

Your main issue is the incompatibility between the version of the binaries you are using as follows:

• You mentioned about using chromedriver=79.0.3945.36 and the release notes of chromedriver=79.0 clearly mentions the following :

Supports Chrome v79

• Presumably you are using chrome v79.0 browser.

• So, it's quite evident your have chromedriver=80.0 present within your system which is also within the system PATH variable and is invoked while you:

  self.driver=webdriver.Chrome()
  

---

Solution

There are two solutions:

• Either you upgrade chrome to Chrome Version 80.0 level. (as per ChromeDriver v80.0 release notes)

• Or you can override the default chromedriver v80.0 binary location with chromedriver v79.0 binary location as follows:

  from selenium import webdriver
  
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
  driver.get('http://google.com/')
  

You can find a detailed discussion in Ubuntu: selenium.common.exceptions: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 79

---

Additional Considerations

Ensure to:

• Clean your Project Workspace through your IDE and Rebuild your project with required dependencies only.
• If your base Web Client version is too old, then uninstall it and install a recent GA and released version of Web Client.
• Take a System Reboot.
• Execute your @Test as non-root user.
• Always invoke driver.quit() within tearDown(){} method to close & destroy the WebDriver and Web Client instances gracefully.

---

Reference

You can find a relevant detailed discussion in:

• How to work with a specific version of ChromeDriver while Chrome Browser gets updated automatically through Python selenium