@CoopMeisterFresh due to the holidays there are going to be some delays before hearing back from anyone at Brave (they typically get Thanksgiving and the corresponding weekend off).
I don’t have a Mac and am clueless on what you’re trying to do. I was trying to do a bit of research after reading your post and deferred a bit to ChatGPT. I’m curious to hear if perhaps any of the bits below might work?
CHATGPT Answer Below:
Yes. There are a few reliable ways to get the Chromium version that Brave is using, even though Brave --version does not show it directly.
Below are the solutions that actually work today.
1. Use brave://version (works everywhere)
Brave exposes the Chromium version on its internal version page.
You can read it manually by opening this URL in Brave:
brave://version
You will see a line labeled “Chromium” with the exact version number.
If you need to extract it programmatically:
Mac example:
/Applications/Brave\ Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave --user-data-dir=/tmp/brave-temp \
--headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom brave://version
The dumped HTML contains the Chromium version, and you can parse it.
This is the most consistent method since Brave already exposes the number there.
2. Read the “Last Chromium Version” from Brave’s release metadata
Brave publishes release metadata for each version. The Chromium base version is always included.
You can grab it programmatically from their GitHub releases API:
Example for stable channel:
https://api.github.com/repos/brave/brave-browser/releases/latest
Look for a line in the release body like:
Chromium: 128.0.6613.119
This is guaranteed accurate since it is the number Brave used during the build.
3. Read it out of the Brave installation bundle (Mac specific)
On macOS, Brave includes a version.plist file inside the app bundle.
You can extract the underlying Chromium version like this:
defaults read "/Applications/Brave Browser.app/Contents/Info" LSCFBundleVersion
or sometimes in:
/Applications/Brave\ Browser.app/Contents/Frameworks/Brave\ Browser\ Framework.framework/Resources/version
That file usually contains the Chromium version string.
4. Use Selenium’s webdriver manager instead of matching manually
If they are using Python, they can avoid all of this entirely by using webdriver_manager which supports Brave. It automatically detects the matching driver.
Example:
from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.binary_location = "/Applications/Brave Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(
ChromeDriverManager().install(),
options=options,
)
The manager automatically inspects the installed browser to determine the correct driver version.
This is usually the simplest option for Selenium users.
.