[ratbeard]

A 'saving…' or 'loading…' popup or any type of interaction preventing mask is a common UX pattern in my opinion in javascripts heavy apps.

We didn't care about testing the popup at all, it was just breaking our other tests in the following way.

In our UI you could click a 'save' button, then a 'saving…' popup appears, meanwhile the 'save' button goes away and an 'edit' button appears (behind the popup), and when the response comes back it says 'Saved.' in the ui.

A test for `$('div=Saved.').toExist()` in wdio works, it does a waitFor under the covers and polls the UI until that text appears. It doesn't care if theres a popup shown or not.

However moving on to the next step in the tests, `$('button=Edit').click()` throws an error 'element is not clickable' if the popup is visible when it happens to runs. Doing multi-command steps like 'check if popup is there, if not click' in general doesn't work as theres so much latency between commands. You can inject javascript in to the page that does both checks in the browsers js process as a hacky workaround.

We did upgrade our webdriver library partly to get waitForClickable() which based on the name at least sounded like it handle the above, but there were no volunteers to update the 168 instances where waitForLoader() had spread in the codebase :/