Watir 6.11.0 is now available on RubyGems. This is the production version of the performance release you’ve been promised.

To install:

gem install watir

or in your Gemfile:

gem "watir", "~> 6.11"

Performance!

See our previous post about the intention of this release. While 6.11 decreases the number of wire calls made in our watirspecs by over 40%, we haven’t had any reports of significant real-world performance improvements. This will have the biggest impact on those who are running remotely with high latency network connections, and for those who use complicated locator strategies. Everyone else should see some minor speed improvements. Let us know if you find any bugs that we didn’t catch with our beta releases, and definitely let us know if you see some solid real-world performance improvements with this.

Regardless, this update has done a lot to simplify our code as we move toward Watir 7.0.

See the Changelog for the complete history of updates.