I’ve been using Python Selenium for a long time and when I initialize a driver to browse any site, a chrome window opens with a banner at the top indicating that the instance “Chrome is controlled by automated testing software”.

I’m currently working on a scraper project that collects data from a site. Everything worked fine. I had managed to make a stable and fast scraper. I then wanted to test my functions with unittest. Once I’d finished creating my unit tests, I began to notice that their results weren’t regular and could change from one execution to the next. I then launched the scraper to check that everything was working, but this was no longer the case.

I noticed that the instance opened by the Selenium driver was no longer a “Chrome” instance but a “Chrome for Testing” instance (with a different logo than usual) and that a new mention appeared at the top of the page in addition to the existing one: “Chrome for Testing v125.0.6422.60 is reserved for automated testing. For normal browsing, …” I also noticed that this browser was much slower for navigation through the site, which explained the problems I’d been having. I haven’t changed anything apart from adding unit tests and I don’t understand why this has changed.

I first tried to remove the test part of my project, which didn’t help. I also checked the driver version, which hadn’t changed since I downloaded it a year ago. I checked the Chrome version, which hadn’t evolved between the time I started having this problem and the time everything was working properly (i.e. a 24-hour interval).

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help !