Can I automate multiple isolated chrome instances with Selenium ChromeDriver

Question

I'm using Selenium ChromeDriver in c# and am trying to launch multiple browser runs in parallel.

I can launch them in parallel alright but noted that they are running on multiple tabs in one browser.. can I somehow specify (in ChromeOptions perhaps) to run each test in a newly spawned browser?

This is my code :

    [TestMethod]
    public void TestInParallel()
    {
        Parallel.ForEach(scenarios, (scenario) =>
        {
            using (var driver = new ChromeDriver(devOptions))
            {
                foreach (var action in scenario.Acties)
                {
                    driver.Navigate().GoToUrl(action.Url);
                    driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10);
                    }
                }
            }
        });
    }

Answer 1

I'm not sure how you tested your sessions issue but having two webdrivers in parallel is a normal case and there should not be issues with cookies or whatever. Below is my test written in Java but you can easily implement it in C#:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "E:/Dev/WebDrivers/chromedriver.exe");
    WebDriver driver1 = new ChromeDriver();
    WebDriver driver2 = new ChromeDriver();
    driver1.get("https://www.amazon.com/ref=nav_logo");
    driver2.get("https://www.amazon.com/ref=nav_logo");
    System.out.println("Driver1 cookies: " + driver1.manage().getCookies());
    System.out.println("Driver2 cookies: " + driver2.manage().getCookies());
    driver1.quit();
    driver2.quit();
}

So here you create two instances of WebDriver and each one will be operating with its own cookies set. I just checked that with amazon website since it uses sessions to track what you're doing on the site even if you're not logged in. Below is the output:

With this approach each webdriver opens their own window (not a tab).

Answer 2

I've asked myself an year ago the same question that you ask here.

What I came up is using soucelab example of using ThreadLocal for storing the webdriver objects and using Selenium-Grid to consume the webdriver requests.

I've done some load/stress test with that configuration to check how stable is selenium grid and the webdriver using that ThreadLocal approach.I've modified a little bit their samples to connect to my local selenium grid. And the result was that in testing 2 sites with 1000 iterations I get 4 failed test and 3 of them was that the site was not reachable (maybe they banned me for a certain moment of time) and 1 stale element reference which I don't know were it came from (my laptop was not in the best shape while doing that). The first failing test's was after 500-th iteration. So I can say that was pretty stable.