How to check if an element is visible with WebDriver

Question

With WebDriver from Selenium 2.0a2 I am having trouble checking if an element is visible.

WebDriver.findElement returns a WebElement, which unfortunately doesn't offer an isVisible method. I can go around this by using WebElement.clear or WebElement.click both of which throw an ElementNotVisibleException, but this feels very dirty.

Any better ideas?

Answer 1

Even though I'm somewhat late answering the question:

You can now use WebElement.isDisplayed() to check if an element is visible.

Note:

There are many reasons why an element could be invisible. Selenium tries cover most of them, but there are edge cases where it does not work as expected.

For example, isDisplayed() does return false if an element has display: none or opacity: 0, but at least in my test, it does not reliably detect if an element is covered by another due to CSS positioning.