ChromeDriver and finding older versions of Brave

#1

I’m way out of my normal territory so what follows may have many mistakes.

The root problem is I am trying to test a Ruby On Rails application and it wants to use ChromeDriver and, of course, out of the box, it wants to use Chrome. I refuse to load Chrome onto my Mac because I’ve caught it doing weird stuff. Plus, it comes from the root of all evil (although ChromeDriver does too).

Someone suggested using Brave so I downloaded the latest and various web pages say to match up the versions so here is what I have. The version of Brave I have is using 78.0.3904.87. The ChromeDriver that “brew” set up is 78.0.3904.70. A page somewhere said that that was good enough but I’m getting an error:

Unable to find latest point release version for 78.0.70. Please set Webdrivers::Chromedriver.required_version = <desired driver version> to a known chromedriver version: https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html

I go to the page mentioned and I see 78.0.3904.70 but nothing for the API that Brave is using …87.

So, one way to solve this I thought was to get an older version of Brave but I can’t find any place that has the previous releases of Brave available for download.

So, the two questions are:

  1. Is there a place to download older versions of Brave?
  2. Are the two versions I have close enough and I just need to set the required_version correctly?
  3. Bonus question: what’s the “proper” way to set the required_version in a Rails app?

Thank you for your time
pedz

#2

@pedz,
While I’m not familiar with Rails, I can tell you that you can find all versions and builds of Brave on our Github page:

#3

Thanks… but now I guess I need to figure out how to stop the auto-update? By the way, I live off of a tiny ISP with about 200KB/s download speeds. It takes a considerable amount of time to update anything so I want maximum control on when that happens. I guess a 2016 issue decided to not be able to disable the auto update?

#4

@pedz,
We have an issue open to add this (disable auto-update) feature to the browser but it hasn’t been implemented yet as other items are higher priority at this time:

#5

I got this working. It works with the previous as well as the latest versions of Brave so the goose chase to find an older version wasn’t needed. But its nice to know that everything in on the GitHub repository.

For anyone who happens to hit this thread, here is what I did. Based upon the “About” output of the current version of Brave, I went to https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html and found the closest match. Then I created a file on the path: config/initializers/webdrivers.rb with the following contents:

Webdrivers::Chromedriver.required_version = ‘78.0.3904.70’
Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome.path = ‘/Applications/Brave Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave Browser’

The value for required_version is the one from the web site, not the precise version that Brave is using. As another web page points out, it only needs to match on the first three (or is it two?) pieces.

Sorry to have cluttered up your Brave forum with what turned out to be a more Rails specific question.