Watir Watir Watir (Web Application Testing in Ruby, pronounced water), is an open-source family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. It drives Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, and is available as a RubyGems gem. Watir was primarily developed by Bret Pettichord and Paul Rogers. Watir project consists of several smaller projects. The most important ones are watir-classic, watir-webdriver and watirspec. Watir-classic makes use of the fact that Ruby has built in Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) capabilities. As such it is possible to drive Internet Explorer programmatically. Watir-classic operates differently than HTTP based test tools, which operate by
Internet Explorer 9 "distinctive and excellent" ActiveX filtering and Tracking Protection features might be "perplexing for less technical users." Having reached release candidate status eleven months after it was originally announced at the March 2010 MIX conference, "Microsoft's development process is too slow." The new version is "a good modern browser" but "the competition is moving faster." "Computing" observed that "the feature set has piled up" since development began, with recent changes including "a completely rejigged JavaScript engine, and far better web standards support." It reported that Internet Explorer 9 RC ranked above Firefox, slightly above Safari, and below Chrome and Opera on