How to use setAutodetect method of org.openqa.selenium.Proxy class

The behaviour is intended. Here is how it works -

1. You issue driver.get(B). It triggers the browser to open the webpage and then it doesnt have anything to do with the browser, so it doesnt care whether an alert is open or not.
2. When the page loads, pop-up dialog appears, but nothing happens on your code side or Eclipse.
3. When you try to perform another operation, it interacts with browser and sees an unexpected popup dialog.

Now, the problem occurs that modal dialog closes and still exception occurs, so try the following.

1. Enclose your second operation in a try/catch and handle UnhandledAlertException
2. Inside that catch block, perform, driver -> switch to -> alert -> accept
3. After the catch block, perform the second operation again.

You can do it by adding Chrome's command line switches "--lang".

Basically, all you need is starting ChromeDriver with an ChromeOption argument --lang=es, see API for details.

The following is a working example of C# code for how to start Chrome in Spanish using Selenium.

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--lang=es");
ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

Java code should be pretty much the same (untested). Remember, locale here is in the form language[-country] where language is the 2 letter code from ISO-639.

public WebDriver getDriver(String locale){   
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "driver/chromedriver.exe");
    ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
    options.addArguments("--lang=" + locale);
    return new ChromeDriver(options);
}

public void initializeSelenium() throws Exception{
    driver = getDriver("es"); // two letters to represent the locale, or two letters + country
}

I believe you can do this with Python, however it isn't packaged as simply as a FluentWait class. Some of this was covered in the documentation you provided by not extensively.

The WebDriverWait class has optional arguments for timeout, poll_frequency, and ignored_exceptions. So you could supply it there. Then combine it with an Expected Condition to wait for elements for appear, be clickable, etc... Here is an example:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import *

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
# Load some webpage
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10, poll_frequency=1, ignored_exceptions=[ElementNotVisibleException, ElementNotSelectableException])
element = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//div")))

Obviously you can combine the wait/element into one statement but I figured this way you can see where this is implemented.

It is better to mark the webdriver as a singleton for the entire framework. I had been currently using this pattern and it works fine.
Note: Care should be taken when dealing with parallel execution.

@CodeEnthusiastic For example take a class GeneralLibrary, in that create a WebDriver.

Extend the classes in Page Object Model with GeneralLibrary as super class

Another answer is not correct. There is also a vulnerability for version 1.x. CVE-2021-4104:

A flaw was found in the Java logging library Apache Log4j in version 1.x. JMSAppender in Log4j 1.x is vulnerable to deserialization of untrusted data. This allows a remote attacker to execute code on the server if the deployed application is configured to use JMSAppender and to the attacker's JMS Broker.

For the mitigation of this vulnerability:

These are the possible mitigations for this flaw for releases version 1.x:

• Comment out or remove JMSAppender in the Log4j configuration if it is used

• Remove the JMSAppender class from the classpath. For example:

  zip -q -d log4j-*.jar org/apache/log4j/net/JMSAppender.class
  

• Restrict access for the OS user on the platform running the application to prevent modifying the Log4j configuration by the attacker.

Try calling createSession before calling clearBrowserCache.

Using your setup, this works:

chromeDriver.getDevTools().createSession();
chromeDriver.getDevTools().send(Network.clearBrowserCache())

and this produces java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException:

chromeDriver.getDevTools().send(Network.clearBrowserCache())

You can verify that the browser cache has been cleared with this snippet:

    ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.get("https://refreshyourcache.com/en/cache-test/");
    Thread.sleep(2000);
    driver.getDevTools().createSession();
    driver.getDevTools().send(Network.clearBrowserCache());
    driver.get("https://refreshyourcache.com/en/cache-test/");
    Thread.sleep(5000);

If you run the code, the pages displayed in the test browser will show these images:

If you commment out the line driver.getDevTools().send(Network.clearBrowserCache()); then you get a different result:

Is this the main purpose for selenium? testing the filling out of forms, checking elements exist and clicking buttons as if it is simulating a web user?

Exactly right.

Selenium is just used for emulating user-actions. Selenium doesn't necessarily do any validating automatically (other than page loads) however, that's up to you.

is [SoapUI] not just the same type of tool as selenium?

Selenium and SoapUI are under the same bracket of tools, but they are not the same tools. Both Selenium and SoapUI are used for testing the web. SoapUI specializes in the web service end, and Selenium specializes in automating the actual web application.

I can see that SOAPUI also has load testing and security testing but isn't this something that can be done using selenium?

It can be done with Selenium yes, but i'm not sure how often people do this. SoapUI does just fine with load testing and security testing since those can be accomplished by hitting the back-end [noting again, that selenium hits front-end, not back.]

What is the main differences between these 2 tools?

Let's take a look at their respective definitions:

Selenium: Automate web browsers. That's it.

SoapUI: ... Testing tool for API's

So, in essence: Selenium can test the front-end, and SoapUI can test the back-end. They are mutually exclusive.

Also what tools can I look to use to test REST API's?

This question - however, is out-of-scope for StackOverflow, therefore I will refrain from answering.

I had an extra ":" in my feature file after Given, When and Then.

It's working now.

Try something this, Change the path and slashing accoding to your specifications :-

            WebDriver driver=null;
            System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","./src//lib//chromedriver");
            DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
            ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
            options.addArguments("test-type");
            options.addArgument("--start-maximized");
            options.addArguments("--disable-web-security");
            options.addArguments("--allow-running-insecure-content");
            capabilities.setCapability("chrome.binary","./src//lib//chromedriver");
            capabilities.setCapability(ChromeOptions.CAPABILITY, options);
            driver = new ChromeDriver(capabilities);
            driver.get("https://www.google.com/");

Below is the link where all available chrome flags are listed :-

http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

Hope it will help you :)