Watir 6.0 beta is now available on rubygems! This gem is an upgrade to the latest watir-webdriver gem and uses Selenium 3.0 beta. Try it out and let us know what you think.

To install:

gem install watir --pre

or in your Gemfile:

gem "watir", ">= 6.0.0.beta2"

Let us know if you are having problems or if you have a reprodicible bug

The biggest change is around Firefox support. Firefox 48+ will no longer work with the old Firefox Driver. Mozilla has required extensions to be signed for security reasons, and the Selenium extension raised security concerns. As such, Watir will now default to using Chrome when the browser type is left unspecified.

Mozilla has been developing a replacement for the Firefox Driver. The browser code is called Marionette, and the driver executable to interact with it is geckodriver. It is attempting to be completely compatible with the new W3C WebDriver standard. Since that spec isn’t finalized yet, there are several features still not implemented.

By default, the following code will use Marionette, and expect to find geckodriver on your system path.

Watir::Browser.new :firefox

The original Firefox Driver may still be used so long as it is with a browser older than Firefox 48. Many companies following this route plan to use Firefox ESR. The following code will specify to use the legacy Firefox Driver, and if multiple versions of Firefox are present on the same machine, the location of the browser to use.

caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.firefox(marionette: false)
Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Binary.path = "/path/to/desired/firefox"
Watir::Browser.new desired_capabilities: caps

See the Changelog for all of the updates.