Best way to keep track and iterate through tabs and windows using WindowHandles using Selenium

You are pretty correct when you say:

WindowHandles would be sorted like the oldest windows first and the newest windows last. But this is not the case: It is totaly random!

In a discussion, Simon clearly mentioned that:

While the datatype used for storing the list of handles may be ordered by insertion, the order in which the WebDriver implementation iterates over the window handles to insert them has no requirement to be stable. The ordering is arbitrary.

So, we will induce an WebDriverWait and then collect the window handles every time we open a new tab/window and finally iterate through the window handles and switchTo().window(newly_opened) as required:

Please adjust the Test Environment if needed [My configuration – Selenium: 3.5.3, IEDriverServer: 3.5.0.0 (64-bit), IE: v10.0]

Java:

package demo;

import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.Set;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedConditions;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

public class NEW_TAB_Handling {

    public static void main(String[] args)  {


        System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\IEDriverServer.exe");
        WebDriver driver =  new InternetExplorerDriver();
        driver.get("http://www.google.com");
        String first_tab = driver.getWindowHandle();
        System.out.println("Working on Google");
        ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("window.open('http://facebook.com/');");
        WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver,5);
        wait.until(ExpectedConditions.numberOfWindowsToBe(2));
        Set<String> s1 = driver.getWindowHandles();
        Iterator<String> i1 = s1.iterator();
        while(i1.hasNext())
        {
            String next_tab = i1.next();
            if (!first_tab.equalsIgnoreCase(next_tab))
            {
                driver.switchTo().window(next_tab);

                System.out.println("Working on Facebook");
            }
        }
        String second_tab = driver.getWindowHandle();
        ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("window.open('http://youtube.com/');");
        wait.until(ExpectedConditions.numberOfWindowsToBe(3));
        Set<String> s2 = driver.getWindowHandles();
        Iterator<String> i2 = s2.iterator();
        while(i2.hasNext())
        {
            String next_tab = i2.next();
            if (!first_tab.equalsIgnoreCase(next_tab) && !second_tab.equalsIgnoreCase(next_tab))
            {
                driver.switchTo().window(next_tab);
                System.out.println("Working on Youtube");
            }
        }
        driver.quit();
        System.out.println("Quit the WebDriver instance");
    }
}

Console Output:

Working on Google
Working on Facebook
Working on Youtube
Quit the WebDriver instance

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Outro

You can find the python based discussion in Open web in new tab Selenium + Python