Watir 6.11.0.beta1 is now available on RubyGems. This is another major performance release. Please help us test this new code before the official release.

To install:

gem install watir --pre

or in your Gemfile:

gem "watir", ">= 6.11.0.beta1"

Performance!

Similar to the Watir 6.4 release last Summer, this release is solely focused on improving performance. Thanks to the work done mostly by Justin Ko, our approach to locating elements has been significantly simplified and optimized.

The changes in this Beta - (#719 & #720) appear to decrease the number of wire calls in the element tests of our suite by about 40%, which appears to drop local execution time (on Travis) by over 15%. This means that when running on a Remote server like Sauce Labs, depending on what kinds of element calls dominate your tests, you could see some impressive performance improvements.

Please try out the new gem on your test suites. We’re interested in finding out about new unexpected exceptions as a result of this change, but feedback on how much it speeds up your tests.

Thanks!

See the Changelog for the complete history of updates.