[🐛 Bug]: Fails to open chrome on managed devices.

[YukiSuter]

What happened?

After hours of debugging on a university PC, the standard C# code (below) fails to open. Instead you get:

followed by the error in VS:

This happens whether it is launched from the run code button or whether the binary is opened manually. When the compiled files are moved to an administrator on a non-managed PC, it runs fine and launches the chrome window. Attempts were made at both installed versions, standalone binaries and selenium-manager.

How can we reproduce the issue?

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Runtime.Versioning;
using System.Security;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using System.Diagnostics;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using System.Net;

namespace Scraper_v2
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {

        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();


            IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
        }
     
    }
}


This is the simple code used. The PC with the issue has many group policies applied.

Relevant log output

Logging never happened.

Operating System

Windows 10

Selenium version

4.29.0

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

Chrome 133

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

ChromeDriver (Version obtained by selenium-manager)

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No response

[github-actions]

@YukiSuter, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

---

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Thank you!

[cgoldberg]

This sounds like the policy prevents launching the browser. Can you launch chrome from the command line on this machine?

[YukiSuter]

Thanks for your comment. If you mean start from command line as in:

start chrome

Yes. It appears to launch fine. I agree I also think it is a policy issue, but im unable to tell where it's getting stuck. Is there a different way selenium launches chrome?

EDIT: The account it was run as was an administrator account (though not exempt from policy)

[cgoldberg]

Selenium calls chromedriver which essentially just calls the Chrome executable.

AFAIK, running Chrome as an Admin user is not supported or recommended.