Chrome webextension refuses to load.

[Minn Dart]

Starting last weekend (5/25), my Chrome webextension refused to load. I still don't know what is causing it whether webdriver version, JDK, OS patch, etc. It ran fine without issue for many months. Did anyone run into same issue? I found a work-around using user-data-dir + profile, I still want our test not being dependent on a Chrome test profile.

Chromedriver.exe version in question is 136 and 137. My test system are based on Windows 11 x64, chromedriver.exe version 136/137, JDK 17, Selenium 4.29, Cucumber 7.21. Our test downloads and uses stable chromedriver.exe and the Chrome browser is almost as latest.

My code looks like this:

ChromeOptions option = new ChromeOptions();

options.addArgument("--load-extension=/path/to/unpackwebextension");

options.addExtension(new File("path/to/webextension.crx"));

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

Did anyone have issue similar to this?

Thanks

[Minn Dart]

Found out the feature was taken out intentionally, https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/15788