.NET Assemblies Are Now Strongly Signed

Starting with Selenium 4.44, the Selenium.WebDriver and Selenium.Support NuGet packages ship strongly signed assemblies. The separate Selenium.WebDriver.StrongNamed and Selenium.Support.StrongNamed packages are discontinued.

Why This Matters

Without strong naming on the official packages, any project that itself needed to be strongly signed could not reference Selenium from NuGet. Teams were forced to either forgo strong naming, bundle out-of-band downloads, or use the separate StrongNamed packages with a different assembly name — all of which caused friction, especially in enterprise environments.

What Changed

• Selenium.WebDriver and Selenium.Support are now strongly signed. Assembly names change: WebDriver → Selenium.WebDriver, WebDriver.Support → Selenium.Support.
• AssemblyVersion stays at 4.0.0.0 (major-only) — no binding redirects needed between 4.x releases.
• Selenium.WebDriver.StrongNamed and Selenium.Support.StrongNamed are retired.

Breaking Changes

If you reference the StrongNamed packages, migrate as follows:

1. Replace Selenium.WebDriver.StrongNamed → Selenium.WebDriver
2. Replace Selenium.Support.StrongNamed → Selenium.Support
3. Update assembly references: WebDriver.StrongNamed → Selenium.WebDriver, WebDriver.Support.StrongNamed → Selenium.Support

If you use the regular packages — the assemblies are now signed but the assembly names change (WebDriver.dll → Selenium.WebDriver.dll, WebDriver.Support.dll → Selenium.Support.dll), so update any explicit assembly references accordingly. The public API is unchanged.

Related Issues

• #12315 — Publish StrongNamed builds to NuGet feed
• #10845 — Revisiting strong-named assemblies for NuGet
• #14115 — Strong Name Key

Implementation: #17397

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