Watir 7.0 Beta 1

Written by: Titus Fortner on March 18, 2021

Watir 7.0.0.beta1 is now available on RubyGems. Watir 7 is coming! Since Watir 7.0 will require Selenium 4.0, this beta release requires at least Selenium 4 beta 2. In spite of being pre-release versions, we recommend using these beta releases over the latest production releases of Watir 6 and Selenium 3.

A lot of deprecated code was removed, so please run your tests with Watir 6.19.1 and make sure you don’t have any deprecation warnings before trying this beta. Please let us know if anything is not working the way you expect it to.

To install:

gem install watir --pre

or in your Gemfile:

gem "watir", ">= 7.0.0.beta1"

Updated Support

  • Requires Selenium 4 beta 2 (or higher)
  • Officially supports Ruby 3
  • Officially supports Chromium based Microsoft Edge

Removes All Deprecated Code

When we upgraded watir-webdriver to Watir 6.0 back in 2016, we marked a few features as deprecated right at the beginning, but never removed the functionality. In the past 4+ years we’ve added literally dozens of deprecations as we identified code that we wanted to simplify and improve. This release finally removes all of it and encourages the behavior that is optimal for performance and future maintenance.

See the Changelog for the complete history of updates.

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