WebDriverException: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary error with Selenium in Python for older versions of Google Chrome

For compatibility reasons I prefer to use Chrome version 55.0.2883.75 with Chromedriver v. 2.26. I downloaded the older version of chrome from https://www.slimjet.com/chrome/google-chrome-old-version.php and Chromedriver 2.26 from https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html?path=2.26/.

I am using the following code to attempt to set my Chrome binary location:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.binary_location = "C:\\Program Files\\Chrome\\chrome64_55.0.2883.75\\chrome.exe"
driver = webdriver.Chrome('chromedriver.exe', chrome_options = options)

However, when I attempt to launch the WebDriver Python returns the following error:

WebDriverException: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.26.436362
(5476ec6bf7ccbada1734a0cdec7d570bb042aa30),platform=Windows NT 10.0.14393 x86_64)

I have tried searching through similar questions and answers but have not had any luck so far. Any help is greatly appreciated - thank you in advance!

This error message...

WebDriverException: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary

...implies that the ChromeDriver was unable to find the Chrome binary in the default location for your system.

As per the ChromeDriver - Requirements:

The ChromeDriver server expects you to have Chrome installed in the default location for each system as follows:

¹ For Linux systems, the ChromeDriver expects /usr/bin/google-chrome to be a symlink to the actual Chrome binary.

Using a Chrome executable in a non-standard location

However you can also override the default Chrome binary location as follows:

To use Chrome version 55.x installed in non standard location through ChromeDriver v2.26 you can use the following code block :

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.binary_location = "C:\\Program Files\\Chrome\\chrome64_55.0.2883.75\\chrome.exe"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options = options, executable_path=r'C:\path\to\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('http://google.com/')
print("Chrome Browser Invoked")
driver.quit()

Reference

You can find a detailed discussion in:

• Is Chrome installation needed or only chromedriver when using Selenium?

What happened to me is that I didn't have chrome, the main browser, installed. Download the browser and it fixes this issue.