watin automation- Disable ONLY Chrome Automation Extension in Selenium

Question

I've been researching this extensively, but I have yet to even find a single topic about this specific question. I use python to access Selenium Webdriver and have been disabling the extensions through python using the code

chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")

Recently, though, I've wanted to load a custom profile, and that means custom extensions. Is there a way to get rid of ONLY the automation extension?

ALSO, as a follow-up curiosity, what even makes the chrome browser automatically start out with this extension loaded?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can disable the Chrome Automation Extension by adding an experimental option to ChromeOptions like so:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions

();

options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);