On 12/2/06, Nathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >So I haven't rejected Firewatir, rather I have not been able to find any new info on it, and >as far as the site here goes, it appears to have been abandoned.
Firewatir moved to Google code as a seprate project because it seemed to be agreed that this best served the needs both of Watir and Firewatir. Firewatir has not been abandoned; site maintenance and code updates have been a little low key, partly because the level of interest in Firewatir (at least as evidenced on this list) doesn't suggest that much breath is being held, and partly because we (primarily Angrez) have been focusing on improving Firewatir performance to bring it being competitive with to what you see with Watir/IE. Early Firewatir versions were very slow (30X to 40X slower than Watir/IE), which made it very frustrating to use it for Firefox testing. The slowness issue should largely have been addressed, though there is much testing, code cleanup, packaging, and documentation to be done. Expect some visible outcome of this in the not too distant future. > I'd like very much to use it and develop it more if necessary. We would like > a good way > to test in Firefox and Safari that isn't proprietary, and free if possible. > One difficulty in our > experience, though it is a good thing, is that only Microsoft products are > bound to putting > OLE/COM servers in their products, so as Firefox and Safari don't have these > things, I'll > need to rely on a plugin. I am not opposed to plugins to do the job. Quick > Test Pro after > all uses a plugin to automate both Firefox and IE, but it has no support for > Safari, and it's > pretty costly for what we get. Also it doesn't do everything we want it to > do. The one > thing I want to completely avoid though is recompiling a browser just so we > can test on it > - a plugin is something everyone can get and use, but recompiling the browser > voids our > tests in our mind. If it works here or doesn't work here when we've > recompiled the > browser, then we cannot guarantee even similar results to people who use a > precompiled > browser. Firewatir requires an extension to be installed in Firefox. This extension - JSSh - is now available packaged as a .xpi, so you don't have to recompile Firefox to use it. You will however need to install the extension, so you'll need to decide whether Firefox-plus-JSSh-extension-installed counts, for your purposes, as a browser modification at par with recompilation or not. For what it's worth, we are introducing Firewatir into our test suites where I work, and have not thus far encountered anything that would lead us to question the validity of any tests that we run using Firewatir. Amit _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
