Selenium - Visual Studios- C# - All (chrome, firefox, and internet explorer) webdrivers unable to start driver service

I have had the same problem on my work machine, but not on my personal machine. The only difference I could attribute between the two was that I was using VS 2015 at home and VS 2017 at work.

What fixed it was I used the NuGet Package Manager for the project and downloaded the Selenium.Firefox.WebDriver by jbaranda, which uses the new marionette based web driver rather than gecko driver.

With this installed I was able to get a firefox browser up and running without any extra configuration or options:

IWebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();driver.Url = "www.google.com";

Whereas before it would throw the 'Cannot start the driver service...' exception you mentioned. There are NuGet packages for other browsers which I suggest for the particular one you're using, but the only one I didn't have that issue with was IE. Hope that helps

I had the same issue, and had had no idea how to fix it. In the end I found out that the Firewall blocked the traffic to loopback. The firewall installed on the machine is McAffe.

All I did was stopping the service which manages traffic scan.

Hope it will help you.

I've been hitting this consistently on IEDriverServer and rarely on FireFox.

Fixed it twice when it happened on FireFox - first time I updated the gecko driver, second time I restarted my PC. Something in the environment's going on, maybe the driver does not fully quit sometimes, so new instantiations are being blocked?