Selenium BiDi Protocol: Configuring Network Interception Without Legacy Polling

Direct Answers

1. Capability: Request the BiDi endpoint explicitly by setting the boolean BiDi capability—commonly surfaced as webSocketUrl in Selenium's Chrome options—to true during session creation. This switches the transport from legacy request/response polling to an event-driven WebSocket.
2. Unpredictable sequence: Any flow that issues a blocking legacy WebDriver command (for example, get, click, or executeScript) while a BiDi network listener is still processing or mutating a request. The legacy command completes before the asynchronous BiDi event finishes, so the browser and client can disagree about the current network state.
3. Recovery: No standardized automatic reconnection or fallback exists. The recommended strategy is to stop the session: quit the driver and start a new one with a fresh BiDi connection. Re-registering listeners on a dropped socket is unproven and risks an indeterminate test state.

Assumptions and Uncertainty

These recommendations assume Chrome 115+ (or an equivalent BiDi-capable engine) and a Selenium client that documents BiDi support. BiDi feature parity is not guaranteed across browsers, and the exact capability name may vary by client release. Verify the capability string against your specific Selenium version before relying on it.

Verification

• Check that the browser version meets the BiDi minimum and that your Selenium client library lists BiDi support.
• After session start, inspect the remote debugging port or driver logs to confirm the WebSocket is open.
• Execute a network request and confirm the listener fires without any manual polling loop.

Missing Diagnostic

If events are already being dropped, the exact Selenium client version and browser build would determine whether a newer capability name or a client-specific reconnection helper is available. Please provide that environment detail if you need a more precise configuration.