How to Launch Multiple Chrome Browsers in Selenium WebDriver?

You can launch multiple Chrome browsers in Selenium WebDriver by using the desired capabilities and the RemoteWebDriver class. Here's how:

Understanding Desired Capabilities

Desired capabilities are a set of key-value pairs that define the browser and its configuration. They tell Selenium which browser to use, its version, and other settings.

Using RemoteWebDriver

The RemoteWebDriver class allows you to control a browser instance running on a remote machine. You can use this class to launch multiple browsers by specifying different desired capabilities for each instance.

Steps to Launch Multiple Chrome Browsers

Set up the desired capabilities: Create a new instance of ChromeOptions for each browser you want to launch. You can specify browser version, extensions, and other settings here.
Create RemoteWebDriver instances: For each browser, create a new instance of RemoteWebDriver using the desired capabilities and the Selenium hub URL.
Execute your tests: Use the WebDriver instances to navigate to websites, interact with elements, and perform other actions.

Example Code:

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;

import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public class MultipleChromeBrowsers {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException {

        // Set up the desired capabilities for the first browser
        ChromeOptions options1 = new ChromeOptions();
        options1.addArguments("--start-maximized"); // Start the browser in maximized mode

        // Set up the desired capabilities for the second browser
        ChromeOptions options2 = new ChromeOptions();
        options2.addArguments("--headless"); // Start the browser in headless mode

        // Create the first RemoteWebDriver instance
        WebDriver driver1 = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub"), options1);
        driver1.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

        // Create the second RemoteWebDriver instance
        WebDriver driver2 = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub"), options2);
        driver2.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

        // Use the WebDriver instances to perform actions
        driver1.get("https://www.google.com");
        driver2.get("https://www.facebook.com");

        // Close the browsers
        driver1.quit();
        driver2.quit();
    }
}

Practical Insights:

You can use the same Selenium server (Selenium Hub) to manage multiple browser instances.
You can use different desired capabilities to create browsers with different configurations (headless, maximized, etc.).
You can use Thread or ExecutorService to manage multiple browsers concurrently.

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