Lessons from a WATIR to WATIR-Webdriver port - #2 Add_checker can still be my friend

I wanted to record problems found (and perhaps solved?) while attempting to port a test automation framework from WATIR to WATIR - Webdriver, and a simple blog entry seemed to be the easiest way.

A colleague advised me that tests ported from WATIR ran extremely slow on IE, and that this was caused by our use of AddCheckers (http://rubydoc.info/gems/watir-webdriver/0.1.7/Watir/Browser#add_checker-instance_method)

As a result, it was assumed that;

add_checker + webdriver = BAD


However, this is not true.  The reason the add_checkers appeared to be slow on IE, was because we used the Text method on the Browser class to scan for certain text on the page.  This is extremely slow in IE for webdriver.


Therefore, add_checkers can be used in webdriver as long as you do not use browser.text