Selenium how to manage wait for page load?

To wait for document.readyState to be complete isn’t a full proof approach to ensure presence, visibility or interactibility of an element.

Hence, the function:

JavascriptExecutor js = (JavascriptExecutor) driver.getWebDriver();
String result = js.executeScript("return document.readyState").toString();
    if (!result.equals("complete")) {
     Thread.sleep(1000)
    } 
}

And even waiting for jQuery.active == 0:

public void WaitForAjax2Complete() throws InterruptedException
{
    while (true)
    {
        if ((Boolean) ((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("return jQuery.active == 0")){
            break;
    }
    Thread.sleep(100);
    }
}

Will be a pure overhead.

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• Selenium IE WebDriver only works while debugging
• Do we have any generic function to check if page has completely loaded in Selenium

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Solution

The effective approach will be to induce WebDriverWait inconjunction with the ExpectedConditions either for:

• presence of element
• visibility of element
• interactibility of element

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• Selenium: How selenium identifies elements visible or not? Is is possible that it is loaded in DOM but not rendered on UI?
• WebDriverWait not working as expected

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More than one thread to crawl

WebDriver is not thread-safe. Having said that, if you can serialise access to the underlying driver instance, you can share a reference in more than one thread. This is not advisable. But you can always instantiate one WebDriver instance for each thread.

Ideally the issue of thread-safety isn’t in your code but in the actual browser bindings. They all assume there will only be one command at a time (e.g. like a real user). But on the other hand you can always instantiate one WebDriver instance for each thread which will launch multiple browsing tabs/windows. Till this point it seems your program is perfect.

Now, different threads can be run on same Webdriver, but then the results of the tests would not be what you expect. The reason behind is, when you use multi-threading to run different tests on different tabs/windows a little bit of thread safety coding is required or else the actions you will perform like click() or send_keys() will go to the opened tab/window that is currently having the focus regardless of the thread you expect to be running. Which essentially means all the test will run simultaneously on the same tab/window that has focus but not on the intended tab/window.