What is implicit wait in Selenium?

Implicit wait in Selenium is a global driver setting that specifies how long to wait for any element before throwing a NoSuchElementException. The driver will retry finding the element during the specified time.

Advantages:

• Easy to set up: configured once for the entire driver object.
• Reduces the number of NoSuchElementException in case of non-instantaneous element loading.

Disadvantages:

• Can slow down test execution if waiting is frequent and at maximum time.
• The wait time applies to all element searches, even those that do not require waiting.
• Ineffective for complex waits (e.g., waiting for text or attribute changes).

It is used as follows:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.implicitly_wait(10) # Set implicit wait to 10 seconds

# All subsequent driver.find_element_* will wait up to 10 seconds