Selenium using Chrome browser - Timeout during HTTP basic authentication [Python] - python-3.x

Question

As a part of automation, I am trying to login to a locally hosted website using selenium. The page serves a HTTP Basic authentication popup and I use the below code to send the credentials. However, upon using a debugger and executing the code step-wise, I deciphered that a TimeOut exception occurs repeatedly (at line marked with a comment beside it).
Details
I tried on Chrome browser and its corresponding chrome WebDriver for all versions from 79.0 till the latest 84.0, but this exception seems to occur in all the cases.
OS - Windows Server W2k12 VM. [Tried on Windows 10 as well]
Python version 3.8
Code
import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
options.add_argument('--ignore-ssl-errors')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get(url)
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
alert = wait.until(EC.alert_is_present()) # This line causes the time out exception
alert = driver.switch_to.alert
alert.send_keys('domain\username' + Keys.TAB + 'password')
alert.accept()
time.sleep(5)
Note:
Due to a bug in the internal page, I cannot send the credentials through the URL using the https://username:password#ipaddress:port format, so this has forced me to resort to making the above selenium method as my only choice.
The corresponding code for firefox works well (for the same target internal website)
Probable Hunch
I wonder, if I am missing any packages on the newly created VM which is crucial for chrome WebDriver to work. For example, Firefox Gecko driver required Visual studio redistributables in order to work. Does chrome WebDriver require any such equivalent packages?

Answer 1

I don't believe that the Basic Auth popup is exposed as an "alert" in ChromeDriver, so AFAIK your only option is https://username:password#ipaddress:port. Interesting that you say that you can program to the popup in Firefox.
Until Chrome 78, the auth popup would display and block the test script, and you had to "manually" enter the credentials (or use a more general "desktop window manipulation" API), but I don't think that works anymore.

Answer 2

What worked here finally was to discard using the Selenium way of using send_keys() approach but use other packages to do the job. The following two snippets worked.
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import keyboard
​
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
options.add_argument('--ignore-ssl-errors')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(r"path_to_chromedriver.exe", options=options)
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get("<replace with url>")
​
keyboard.write(r"<replace with username>")
keyboard.press_and_release("tab")
keyboard.write("<replace with password>")
keyboard.press_and_release("tab")
keyboard.press_and_release("enter")
Or this one (pip install pywin32 before)
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import win32com.client
​
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
options.add_argument('--ignore-ssl-errors')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(r"path_to_chromedriver.exe", options=options)
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get("<replace with url>")
​
shell = win32com.client.Dispatch("WScript.Shell")
shell.SendKeys(r"<replace with username>")
shell.SendKeys("{TAB}")
shell.SendKeys("<replace with password>")
shell.SendKeys("{TAB}")