Selenium Crashing: Chrome automation extension has crashed

Question

I am using Selenium web drivers, and today, for no apparant reason I started getting an error with the message"Chrome Automation Extension has crashed. Click this balloon to reload the extension".

The only thing I can think of is I added an extension for testing XPath to Chrome today. But it was working fine for a while after I added that.

Could it be some Chrome security issue?

Answer 1

I had the same problem, I could resolve it as the following:
1.Don't run Chrome as Admin.
2.Don't run your selenium App as Admin.

Answer 2

Ok, so you are serious about the admin part as a solution to the problem?

Why not follow the advices from Google? http://chromedriver.chromium.org/help/chrome-doesn-t-start

Passing '--no-sandbox' flag when creating your WebDriver session. Special test environments sometimes cause Chrome to crash when the sandbox is enabled.

So I ended up doing as they adviced and can run things as admin. Guess it's a way forward for me now and hopefully it's a valid solution for others too.

var options = new ChromeOptions(); options.AddArgument("--no-sandbox"); browser = new ChromeDriver(options);