Why doesn't Selenium provide auto-waiting like modern frameworks?

Selenium's core API predates the "auto-waiting locator" design popularized by newer tools by well over a decade, and it was built on top of the WebDriver protocol's model of discrete, synchronous commands rather than a lazy, retrying query abstraction layered on top of them.

Adding true auto-waiting to every action would mean changing the fundamental contract of methods like findElement() and .click() across every language binding and every existing test relying on their current synchronous, throw-immediately behavior - a breaking change with enormous ecosystem-wide impact given how many production suites already exist.

Instead, Selenium's evolution has layered waiting capability on top as opt-in tools - implicit waits, WebDriverWait with ExpectedConditions, fluent waits - rather than baking retry logic into the core find-and-act methods themselves. This preserves backward compatibility at the cost of requiring test authors to explicitly reach for the right waiting mechanism, rather than getting it automatically the way a locator-first framework does.