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
Firefox 3.5 to support X BitMap images. Estimates of Firefox 3.5's global market share in February 2010 were around 15–20% and rose rapidly in July 2009 as users migrated from Firefox 3.0. From January 2010 it began to decline as users migrated to Firefox 3.6. Between mid-December 2009 and February 2010, Firefox 3.5 was the most popular browser (when counting individual browser versions) according to StatCounter, and was one of the top 3 browser versions according to Net Applications. Both milestones involved passing Internet Explorer 7, which previously held the No. 1 and No. 3 spots in popularity according to StatCounter and