What is Selenium WebDriver's default implicit wait value?

Question

What is Selenium WebDriver's default implicit wait value?

The selenium documentation says that it is "0" but when I call .findElement on a brand new project, where a element doesn't exist on the DOM, it seems to get a TimeoutException after a while rather than hang indefinitely. Does "0" mean wait forever or not?

Answer 1

The default value for implicit waits is indeed zero, which means (and always has meant) "fail findElement immediately if the element can't be found." You shouldn't be receiving a TimeoutException directly from findElement. You'll likely only be receiving that when using a so-called "explicit wait", using the WebDriverWait construct.

Answer 2

I believe, in SeleniumBasic at least, the implicit wait is 3000ms, or 3 seconds. You can find out for yourself by simply using msgbox(driver.timeouts.implicitwait()).