How can I make .goto non-blocking?

I'm writing a rails app which fetches text from an HTML page using Watir and Chrome Headless. All good so far!

The problem starts when I request a page which has a long load time to completely load all elements despite the fact that I don't need them.

Current code I use:

browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome, headless: true

browser.goto(url)

The .goto function call, however, blocks until ALL elements have loaded. That's not really what I need - what I need is for goto to just start fetching the page, then continue running code since I really just want to wait until the text I need is present, then fetch it.

Any ideas?

Solution

Goto will not leave the control until 60 seconds, If page load time exceeds 60 seconds, then it would throw the error. And also Watir.default_timeout has nothing to do with Goto's page loading. You need to set the timings for page_load which you can do by directly calling selenium driver as I have done below because Watir hasn't offered any systax for that

Write the below code, you could achieve what you want

 begin
  b.driver.manage.timeouts.page_load=5
  b=Watir::Browser.new
  b.goto(url)
rescue            #I have written the rescue block here because goto will the error for you If page is not loaded within a given time
end

AND THEN you can write your rest of the code here, for an example,

puts b.span(text: 'something').text

What happens here is, goto will be block the execution of the code followed by goto for 5 seconds, and then it would fall into the rescue block, so program would continue to execute next line as you expected.