release Selenium chromedriver.exe from memory

Solution 1:

per the Selenium API, you really should call browser.quit() as this method will close all windows and kills the process. You should still use browser.quit().

However: At my workplace, we've noticed a huge problem when trying to execute chromedriver tests in the Java platform, where the chromedriver.exe actually still exists even after using browser.quit(). To counter this, we created a batch file similar to this one below, that just forces closed the processes.

kill_chromedriver.bat

@echo off
rem   just kills stray local chromedriver.exe instances.
rem   useful if you are trying to clean your project, and your ide is complaining.

taskkill /im chromedriver.exe /f

Since chromedriver.exe is not a huge program and does not consume much memory, you shouldn't have to run this every time, but only when it presents a problem. For example when running Project->Clean in Eclipse.

Solution 2:

browser.close() will close only the current chrome window.

browser.quit() should close all of the open windows, then exit webdriver.