topic Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode? in Product Forum

Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

blue_meanie — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:40:24 GMT

We're looking to upgrade to V7.5 at the moment, and one of the things I was keen for the team to explore was the use of the new Chromium Spy mode to see if it would make working with modern browsers any easier or more efficient.

We've had a bit of a play with it so far, but can't find a single reason why we would want to use it over Browser Mode as it still relies on the same CSS Selectors/XPaths to find elements efficiently.

Add to that the fact you can't use AA, Region or UIA (shudder) spies in Chromium Mode, and you need to mess around with defining unique ports to allow multiple applications to work, and it seems like it would be far more of a pain to use than what we already had with previous versions.

Are we missing the point here?

Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

david.l.morris — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:58:43 GMT

In general, I agree with what you're saying and you are not wrong that there isn't normally a reason to use Chromium Spy Mode over Browser Mode.

The main thing to recognize is that the Chromium Spy Mode was likely not originally created for the purpose of improving browser automation. It does technically have some benefits (mainly speed), but the Chromium Spy Mode was introduced in like 7.4 or so and was called Electron Mode or something like that. Electron apps are basically desktop applications that are built on Chromium and thus we can interact with those kinds of apps in a similar way that we automate browsers by using XPath and CSS Selectors. Examples of Electron apps are Discord, Spotify, technically MS Edge I think is an Electron app I guess, and others. I even tested this on Discord. In the past, I was not able to reliably automate Discord using Blue Prism, but this Chromium Spy Mode (Previously called Electron Mode or whatever) was able to automate it with no problem.

So, then, in 7.5, Blue Prism recognized it might make sense to just adjust this mode by expanding its scope to also work on Web applications in MS Edge since I guess extending the functionality was not hard to do. They also renamed it to make it clear to people that it can be used for any Chromium-based application.

I think having that stuff in mind makes it more clear why it exists in the first place.

To address your point about why we might use it for automating web applications, I can think of two reasons for now but they are not really that big of a deal to me even if the first one is really cool for demos:

1 - It is much, much faster. Granted, when it comes to Production automations that are waiting on the app to load and navigate and such, I suspect it would not be much of a difference overall. But for quick individual operations, I found it to be 10x-20x faster. For example, on RPA Challenge, browser mode for me takes about between 3-6 seconds. With Chromium Spy Mode, it takes 300 ms. Again, does that matter for Production automations? Usually no.

2 - It does not use the Blue Prism browser extension. This means that any instability that comes with the browser extension does not occur with the Chromium Spy Mode. That said, the use of the browser extension was significantly improved when Blue Prism introduced the browser messaging host and got away from the fixed/ephemeral port stuff. But, in any case, I think it is a nice option to have.

Edit: By the way, I personally would recommend going to 7.4.2 (there will be a hotfix for it for an issue with timeouts in wait stages). Either that or potentially wait for 7.5.1. Maybe the version will work just fine for you but I would avoid some headaches by going to 7.4.2 or 7.5.1 (once it is out).

Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

blue_meanie — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:37:13 GMT

Thanks Dave, excellent analysis and summary as always.

I had read (or maybe seen it on one of your videos) about the significant speed difference between the modes, but when we ran some rudimentary comparisons of elements spied with either CSS Selectors or decent XPaths, the time difference wasn't enough to warrant rebuilds.

And agree that Browser Extension issues seem to be a thing of the past, so wasn't a problem we needed to overcome any more.

ps. It was me who raised the timeout 'feature' introduced in 7.4.1/7.5 - can't believe no one else had spotted it already! We have over 12,000 conditional waits in our codebase, so this was a complete show-stopper for us going ahead with the upgrade. We've waited patiently enough to move from 6.10.5, so a few more months to wait for 7.5.1 isn't going to hurt.

Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

david.l.morris — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:45:36 GMT

I was wondering if anyone else submitted that bug as well. You may have submitted it before I did. I submitted a report about that bug on March 10th since we just hadn't run into the issue before that during testing, and then the bug was confirmed on March 11th, so that makes sense if they were already working on figuring it out based on your report earlier than that. It only became obvious to us when some of the wait stages I created with 0 second timeouts were no longer working. Good on you for reporting it! 😃

Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

blue_meanie — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:50:03 GMT

This immediately popped into my head! 😁

Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

Neel1 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:19:10 GMT

With respect to version 7.5, Chromium mode requires further updates and stabilization. My limited testing results also gives hope that it is bit faster then browser mode.

Raised few bugs with the Blue Prism team, related to the Wait stage and dropdown selection, and these fixes are already planned for inclusion in the next release.

While you guys already discussed about Features and limitation, i have something handy with me which i am sharing below.

1. Chromium mode is not currently available in Enhanced Application Modeler
2. Chromium attributes can’t be gathered using the Application Navigator or UI Automation Navigator.
3. Following modes can’t be used in Chromium mode : Accessibility, UI Automation, Region mode, or Smart Vision.
4. It is not currently possible to migrate automations created in previous releases using the browser extensions to Chromium spy mode without having to re-spy the elements in the application model.
5. A new Business Object need to be created to use Chromium Mode

Re: Are there any benefits to using the new Chromium Spy Mode?

david.l.morris — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:13:44 GMT

For anyone who comes across this post, note that Blue Prism is adding more and more functionality to the Chromium Spy Mode. As of 7.5.1, which appears to have come out today (March 30th, 2026), there are a few additions to the Chromium Spy Mode features that are directly correlated to some of the limitations we've mentioned earlier in this thread, including but likely not limited to these:

Spying Chromium-based applications using Chromium mode now supports Accessibility (AA), UI Automation (UIA), Region mode, or Smart Vision spy modes, allowing you to switch between them within the same application model.
New read, navigation, and wait actions are also available in the Chromium Application Model.
Addresses a known issue in 7.5 related to a change in wait stage behavior

That wait stage item is probably the same thing we were mentioning related to timeouts.

Those items above were directly copied from the blog post here: SS&C | Blue Prism Enterprise 7.5.1 is available for download