Starting a Session

Opening a Browser

Once you’ve installed Watir, and your desired drivers, and have an open irb session, you can try out opening a browser with:

require 'watir'
browser = Watir::Browser.new

to close the browser:

browser.close

By default Watir will open a Chrome Browser. To open other browsers, specify the one you want as the first argument:

Watir::Browser.new :firefox
Watir::Browser.new :internet_explorer
Watir::Browser.new :edge
Watir::Browser.new :safari

To open a browser on a remote machine, specify the url after the browser argument

Watir::Browser.new :firefox, url: "http://#{the_grid_url}:4444/wd/hub"

Check out the Capabilities Guide for how you can both ensure that you are getting the session you want, and to specify how the browser should behave during the session.

Starting a Session

Opening a Browser

Last Updated: March 12, 2021