Why has my WebDriver Browser Not Closed?

One question that crops up a lot is “Why is my browser not closing?”, and there are multiple reasons for this.

Close the Browser in a method that always runs

Tests fail.

If you have a driver.quit() as the last statement in your @Test and the test fails, then the browser will be left open.

Add the closing statement in an @After, @AfterClass (JUnit 4) or @AfterEach, @AfterAll (JUnit 5).

    @AfterAll
    public static void endSelenium(){
        driver.close();
    }

Did you Close or Quit or both

WebDriver has two methods:

• .close()
• .quit()

The documentation for close says that it will close the browser if it is the last window that is closed.

quit will close all windows.

But… drivers change and interpret this in different ways.

• For some Firefox releases, this did not happen. Therefore I used to use close, and quit.
• Recently, with Firefox, if I close and then quit an exception will be raised when I quit.
• With ChromeDriver if I close and quit then nothing untoward happens.

You can be ‘good’ and Use quit when you know it is the last window you are working with. Or if you are working with a Driver Manager abstraction then you might want to stick the quit in a JVM Shutdown.

A general purpose solution is to use both close and quit but wrap the quit in a try catch block.

    @AfterAll
    public static void endSelenium(){
        driver.close();
        try{
            driver.quit();
        }catch (Exception e){
            System.out.println("Browser closed already, " +
                            "did not need to quit after all");
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

And of course if we did something like this then we could delegate it off to an abstraction layer.

    @AfterAll
    public static void endSelenium(){
        CloseDriver.now(driver);
    }

Full Source

The full source for this is in my Webdriver Java FAQs project:

• https://github.com/eviltester/seleniumWebDriverCompendium/tree/main/webdriverjavafaqs

Specifically:

• https://github.com/eviltester/seleniumWebDriverCompendium/tree/main/webdriverjavafaqs/src/test/java/browsers/WhyBrowserNotClosingProperly

If you want to learn how to use Selenium WebDriver with Java then check out our online courses.