Page loading strategy in Selenium WebDriver

• Page loading Concept:

Defines the current session’s page loading strategy. By default, when Selenium WebDriver loads a page, it follows the normal pageLoadStrategy. It is always recommended to stop downloading additional resources (like images, css, js) when the page loading takes a lot of time.

The document.readyState property of a document describes the loading state of the current document. By default, WebDriver will hold off on responding to a driver.get() (or) driver.navigate().to() call until the document ready state is complete

In SPA applications (like Angular, React, Ember) once the dynamic content is already loaded (I.e once the pageLoadStrategy status is COMPLETE), clicking on a link or performing some action within the page will not make a new request to the server as the content is dynamically loaded at the client side without a pull page refresh.

SPA applications can load many views dynamically without any server requests, So pageLoadStrategy will always show COMPLETE status until we do a new driver.get() and driver.navigate().to().

WebDriver pageLoadStrategy supports the following values:

• normal:

This will make Selenium WebDriver wait for the entire page to load. When set to normal, Selenium WebDriver waits until the load event fires.

By default normal is set to the browser if none is provided.

       ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();

        chromeOptions.setPageLoadStrategy(PageLoadStrategy.NORMAL);

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);

        try {

            // Navigate to Url

            driver.get("https://google.com");

        } finally {

            driver.quit();

        }

• eager:

This will make Selenium WebDriver to wait until the initial HTML document has been completely loaded and parsed, and discards loading of stylesheets, images and subframes.

When set to eager, Selenium WebDriver waits until the DOMContentLoaded event fire is returned.

      ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();

        chromeOptions.setPageLoadStrategy(PageLoadStrategy.EAGER);

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);

        try {

            // Navigate to Url

            driver.get("https://google.com");

        } finally {

            driver.quit();

        }

• none:

When set to none, Selenium WebDriver only waits until the initial page is downloaded.

      ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();

        chromeOptions.setPageLoadStrategy(PageLoadStrategy.NONE);

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);

        try {

            // Navigate to Url

            driver.get("https://google.com");

        } finally {

            driver.quit();

        }