Chromedriver/Chrome is pretty great at executing WebDriverJs scripts without taking away your focus (so you can execute them in the background whilst doing other things), the one exception I found was selecting items in a select list. I found it would do this:
The select lists just appear over whatever you’re doing (on macOS).
I couldn’t find the reason why by Googling this, so I had a look at the code I wrote to select each item from a select list. One example:
driverHelper.clickWhenClickable( this.driver, By.css( 'select.phone-input__country-select' ) );
driverHelper.clickWhenClickable( this.driver, By.css( `select.phone-input__country-select option[value="${countryCode}"]` ));
The code opens the select list by clicking on it and then selects the value from the opened list.
I thought the click to open was required, but tried it without:
It turns out the first select list click isn’t necessary, and by not having it the select list doesn’t appear above other windows whilst the tests are executing.
This is a much better outcome as the tests are less intrusive on other things you’re doing.
How do you control select lists in WebDriver?