What are different types of waits available in Selenium WebDriver?

Selenium WebDriver provides 3 types of waits to handle synchronization between test code and the browser:

1. Implicit Wait Tells WebDriver to wait for a specified time before throwing NoSuchElementException.

driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(Duration.ofSeconds(10));

Applied globally to all findElement() calls.

2. Explicit Wait (WebDriverWait) Waits for a specific condition before proceeding.

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, Duration.ofSeconds(10));
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("result")));

Applied to specific elements. Most commonly used in frameworks.

3. Fluent Wait Advanced explicit wait with custom polling interval and exception ignore list.

Wait<WebDriver> fluentWait = new FluentWait<>(driver)
    .withTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(30))
    .pollingEvery(Duration.ofSeconds(2))
    .ignoring(NoSuchElementException.class);

Comparison:

Avoid Thread.sleep() — hard pause that wastes time even when element is ready.