Watir 7.3 is now available on RubyGems. Two small features and some maintenance.

To install:

gem install watir

or in your Gemfile:

gem "watir", "~> 7.3"

New Features

Two small feature additions for this release:

• DateField and DateTimeField can be set with anything responding to #strftime instead of specific objects.
• Cookies can set values for http_only and same_site

Watir and Selenium

Selenium has been churning out releases and making changes over the past year, mostly removing code that Watir doesn’t use, and requiring users to change things to what Watir is already doing. Watir continues to be an effective way to leverage the browser automation power of Selenium with the opinions and synchronization required to more easily maintain your test suites.

Technically, Watir 7.3 only requires Selenium 4.2 or greater (necessary for the new scrolling features), but it is highly recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of Selenium. Selenium 4.11 natively manages drivers better than the webdrivers gem, with more features coming, so you can stop requiring webdrivers and just let Selenium handle it. To keep up with the latest changes in Selenium that are available to Watir users, pay attention to the Selenium blog

Watir and BiDi

The primary functionality in Selenium that Watir has been ignoring so far is related to BiDirectional / Chrome DevTools Protocol features. The CDP implementation in Selenium is a temporary placeholder while the w3c browser tools working group completes the specification for WebDriver BiDi. Watir users can access the current features at any time by referencing the Selenium code and using the Selenium driver which can be obtained by: driver = browser.wd.

BiDi is the future of browser automation, and the Watir team is keeping a close eye on the state of the technology, and will figure out how best to support these features within the Watir API when they become standardized and as future versions of Selenium (think Selenium 5.0 and 6.0) make more use of them.

See the Changelog for the complete history of updates.