Selenium speaks the W3C WebDriver protocol over HTTP, not CDP. Steel runs a WebDriver endpoint at http://connect.steelbrowser.com/selenium. Point webdriver.Remote at it, attach the Steel API key and session ID as headers on every request, and the rest is plain Selenium 4.

Sessions for Selenium need is_selenium=True on creation — that flag provisions a WebDriver-compatible node. Without it you get a CDP browser that Selenium cannot drive.

Requirements

• Steel API Key: Active Steel subscription
• Runtime: Python 3.10+
• Package: selenium 4+

Connect Steel to Selenium

Subclass RemoteConnection to inject steel-api-key and session-id headers on every WebDriver request, then point webdriver.Remote at Steel's WebDriver endpoint:

import os
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.remote.remote_connection import RemoteConnection
from steel import Steel

class SteelRemoteConnection(RemoteConnection):
    def __init__(self, remote_server_addr: str, session_id: str):
        super().__init__(remote_server_addr)
        self._session_id = session_id

    def get_remote_connection_headers(self, parsed_url, keep_alive=False):
        headers = super().get_remote_connection_headers(parsed_url, keep_alive)
        headers["steel-api-key"] = os.environ["STEEL_API_KEY"]
        headers["session-id"] = self._session_id
        return headers

client = Steel(steel_api_key=STEEL_API_KEY)
session = client.sessions.create(is_selenium=True)

driver = webdriver.Remote(
    command_executor=SteelRemoteConnection(
        remote_server_addr="http://connect.steelbrowser.com/selenium",
        session_id=session.id,
    ),
    options=webdriver.ChromeOptions(),
)

Each command is an HTTP round-trip, so prefer WebDriverWait with expected_conditions over blind time.sleep to avoid compounding latency.

Full runnable starter: Steel + Selenium recipe →

Resources

• Selenium Python documentation – Official Python bindings reference
• WebDriver protocol – W3C specification
• Steel Sessions API reference – Technical details for managing Steel browser sessions
• Steel Discord – Get help and share what you build