[🚀 Feature]: Implement download tracking in selenium manager

[titusfortner]

Feature and motivation

The idea is to get basic usage information about who is using Selenium Manager.

We could create a basic page on https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/manager. The Selenium Manager would route all requests for downloads through that page.

Something like:

https://selenium.dev/selenium/download/manager?language=ruby&os=linux&driver=geckodriver&driver_version=v0.32.0

Which would redirect and return the correct file, but would allow us to see what language/os/browser/browser versions are being used.

[bonigarcia]

I agree that it would be very interesting to know how many users are using Selenium Manager. But I am unsure if proxying each Selenium Manager request is the best choice since it can be problematic. In the best case, the performance of downloading drivers will be higher by putting an intermediate page intercepting the traffic. Moreover, the selenium.dev server could be a bottleneck. Finally, we will need backend support to track all these requests.

Maybe an alternative way is to continue downloading directly from each driver repository (chromedriver, geckodriver, etc.), and create a tracking endpoint in selenium.dev which is invoked after resolving a driver by Selenium Manager. But even in that case, we are creating additional overhead for the sake of monitoring the use of Selenium Manager.

[krmahadevan]

Just curious. What do we intend to do with this data?

[diemol]

As a start, we want to track usage, know how many users in which languages are now relying on Selenium Manager. We have invested a great amount of time, and it'd be very useful to know if the code we are shipping is being used. After learning usage, we can start figuring out what else we want to measure and how.

Also, following what @bonigarcia mentions, coding and/or hosting ourselves a tracking solution is shooting ourselves in the foot. It would be the ideal solution because we could ensure some privacy first. Currently we use https://plausible.io/ to track selenium.dev, but the quota we are paying would not be enough to hold the data we would capture.

I guess the easiest solution would be to use Google Analytics , I implemented a client to track Zalenium usage back then, but we had help from the legal area in my previous company to draft the terms and conditions to be compliant. If we want to use that, we need to check with the PLC and ask the SFC for their help with the legal terms.

[titusfortner]

How much extra traffic are we expecting if each driver download sends a http call with a few bytes of data that doesn't expect a response?

[titusfortner]

Just saying it might be worth paying plausible a little more if it can track that info. Would still want to double check with SFC on privacy

[diemol]

I will check with Plausible and see how much they could charge us.

[bonigarcia]

I am lost with this feature. Is it still required?

[diemol]

It would be nice to have. But it adds overhead to each request. Maybe we can wait until we release Selenium Manager officially to track downloads in that way? Tracking every single request might be too much.

[bonigarcia]

I totally agree that it would be great to monitor the use of Selenium Manager, but adding that overhead is too much, IMO.

[diemol]

I just realized that having an official release won't track downloads since we package SM in the bindings.

[bonigarcia]

I just realized that having an official release won't track downloads since we package SM in the bindings.

Yes, that's true.