[🐛 Bug]: SM doesn't find firefox-beta/firefox-devedition

[kevinoid]

Description

Selenium Manager 0.4.45 appears to be unable to find firefox-beta or firefox-devedition in $PATH on Linux if firefox is not in $PATH.

Note: This occurs if the firefox-beta or firefox-devedition DEB packages from Mozilla are installed and neither the firefox nor firefox-esr packages (from Debian or Mozilla) are installed.

Reproducible Code

/path/to/selenium-manager --browser firefox --browser-version beta --trace

Debugging Logs

[2026-06-20T20:52:04.911Z TRACE] Reading metadata from /home/kevin/.cache/selenium/se-metadata.json
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.911Z TRACE] Metadata file does not exist. Creating a new one
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.911Z TRACE] Checking geckodriver in PATH
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.911Z DEBUG] geckodriver not found in PATH
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.912Z TRACE] Checking firefox in PATH
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.913Z DEBUG] firefox not found in PATH
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.913Z TRACE] Using shell command to find out firefox version
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.913Z DEBUG] firefox beta not found in the system
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.913Z TRACE] Reading metadata from /home/kevin/.cache/selenium/se-metadata.json
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.913Z TRACE] Metadata file does not exist. Creating a new one
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.971Z DEBUG] Valid geckodriver versions for firefox 0: []
[2026-06-20T20:52:04.971Z ERROR] Not valid geckodriver version found for firefox 0. Check available versions at https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/

[selenium-ci]

@kevinoid, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

Selenium Triage Team: remember to follow the Triage Guide

[diemol]

Is this something new, or has it always happened? Did the binary name for Firefox beta and/or dev-edition change?

[kevinoid]

The lack of firefox binary may be unique to the Debian packages shipped by Mozilla, which were introduced at the end of 2023. (If it is important, I could confirm this was true in the earliest package versions.) The packages provided by Debian include a symlink from /usr/bin/firefox to other binaries (e.g. to firefox-esr) . The executable name in the Mozilla-provided tarballs for Beta, Developer Edition, and Nightly is also firefox.

I am not aware of any relevant changes to Selenium Manager, so I suspect it has always been an issue for users with only beta/devedition Debian packages from Mozilla installed.

[diemol]

Maybe @bonigarcia knows more about this.