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
Chakra (JScript engine) Chrome (with V8), and Opera (with Carakan). On March 8, 2011, Microsoft published results showing the 32-bit Internet Explorer 9 to be faster than Safari, Firefox (with TraceMonkey), Chrome, and Opera. March 2011 performance tests for ZDNet concluded that Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit), Chrome 10, and Firefox 4 release candidate were "pretty evenly matched." In 2012, subsequent versions of Chakra, such as the version included in Internet Explorer 10, introduced additional performance changes, including JIT compilation on x64 and ARM architectures, and optimizations related to floating point math and garbage collection. At the Last Call JSCONF in 2015, Microsoft announced