How exactly implicitWait is handled dynamically in selenium?

Question

I have a doubt related to the implicit wait of selenium? As we know that Implicit Wait is dynamic wait that means if we mention that wait for 10 seconds for any element to be loaded but if the element is loaded within 4 seconds then driver comes out of the wait.

So, the question is that how driver came to know that element is loaded in 4 seconds and lets come out from the wait? We have not mentioned any condition in Implicit Wait like look for the visibility of any element and then come out then how exactly implicit wait takes a call to to come out of the wait?

Answer 1

The implicit wait is happening at the driver level, Explicit wait is happening at the programming level. Most people are not aware of this.

Implicit wait only checks whether it exists or not, so you don't have to specify any condition as you do for an explicit wait. But I have raised a ticket to include the implicit wait for visibility as well in Chrome(See here https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromedriver/issues/detail?id=2016) and Firefox, Chrome has incorporated that change but firefox still hasn't. I asked them to include it because Firefox Legacy driver waits for element existence and visibility so I want the same to be here.

Answer 2

Implicit Wait can't be handled dynamically using Selenium. In his epic comment Jim Evans [Maintainer - DotNet client / IEDriverServer] mentioned that, implicitlyWaits are often (always may not be) implemented on the remote side of the WebDriver system. That means ImplicitWait are baked in to the WebDriver variants i.e. GeckoDriver, IEDriverServer, ChromeDriver, the WebDriver Firefox extension that gets installed into the anonymous Firefox profile (Selenium RC), and the Java remote WebDriver server (selenium-server-standalone.jar).

Once you set the implicitly_wait, the WebDriver instance would be able to carry this configuration till its lifetime. To set the timespan of the waiting time, you can:

• Python:

  driver.implicitly_wait(5)
  

• Java:

  driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
  

• DotNet:

  driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5);
  

If at any point of time you want to remove the ImplicitWait you can achieve it as follows:

• Python:

  driver.implicitly_wait(0)
  

• Java:

  driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(0, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
  

• DotNet:

  driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0);