Selenium gives “unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary” when running chrome driver on Ubuntu

Question

I am trying to run selenium [java] tests using chrome driver on Latest ubuntu.[16.04]

I am getting the following error/exception. As an experiment, I replaced Chrome

Answer 1

I found the problem. On my linux system, Google Chrome Browser was not installed.

I was under the impression that ChromeDriver binary has got a browser implementation in it. Now I realized that's wrong , ChromeDriver binary is a selenium wrapper that calls Google Chrome.

I must say that the exception message "selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary" is confusing. If it was telling that "Chrome Browser is not installed" or something similar it would have been much easier.

Thanks George