Why Selenium Might Not Handle Your "Alert"

Selenium handles real alerts (triggered by JavaScript methods like alert(), confirm(), or prompt()) and Fake-alerts (HTML elements styled to look like alerts) differently.

1. Handling Real Alerts

Real alerts are system-level pop-ups. You can’t inspect them in the browser, but Selenium can interact with them using the Alert API.

Code:

// Navigate to a real alert

driver.get("https://testpages.herokuapp.com/styled/alerts/alert-test.html");

// Trigger and dismiss the alert

driver.findElement(By.id("alertexamples")).click();

driver.switchTo().alert().accept();        

2. Handling Fake-Alerts

Pseudo-alerts are just HTML elements, like <div> tags, styled to look like alerts. You can inspect and interact with them like regular web elements.

Code:

// Navigate to a pseudo-alert/fake-alert (HTML div)

driver.get("https://testpages.herokuapp.com/styled/alerts/fake-alert-test.html");

// Trigger the pseudo-alert

driver.findElement(By.id("fakealert")).click();

// Wait for the pseudo-alert to appear and close it

new WebDriverWait(driver, Duration.ofSeconds(10)).until(

    ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("dialog")));

driver.findElement(By.id("dialog-ok")).click();        

Examples of pseudo-alerts include:

• those horrible “welcome to our website for the first time will you take our survey about our web site” dialogs
• “you need to be logged in to see this content” overlays
• “sign up for my mailing list and I’ll let you see what you came here for” overlay
• “tweet this and then I’ll let you read it” overlay

Key Takeaway

Use Selenium’s Alert API for real alerts, and standard element interaction methods for pseudo-alerts.

Happy Testing !