Testing / Playwright Interview questions

What is the difference between waitForSelector and waitForLoadState?

These wait for two different things, and confusing them is a common source of either flaky or unnecessarily slow tests.

waitForSelector	waitForLoadState
Waits for a specific element to reach a state (attached/visible)	Waits for the page as a whole to reach a load milestone
Element-scoped	Page-scoped
Largely superseded by auto-waiting locators	Still commonly used after navigation or SPA route changes

page.waitForSelector() is mostly legacy now, since modern locators auto-wait for the same conditions implicitly. page.waitForLoadState('networkidle') is still genuinely useful, though, for cases like waiting for a single-page app to finish its post-navigation data fetching before interacting with content that only appears afterward.

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waitForSelector operates at what scope? A single element

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The entire page's network activity

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The whole browser context

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Why is waitForSelector considered mostly legacy today? It was removed from the API

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Modern auto-waiting locators handle the same job implicitly

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It only works in Firefox

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