On my previous project I used Cucumber on top of Capybara to driver out WebDriver. We were initially going to use ChromeDriver instead of the default FireFox … but I decided at the last minute to stick with Firefox.

Recently, I heard rumors that ChromeDriver is “Faster” than Firefox. So, like the curious person that I am, I decided to switch out FireFox for ChromeDriver to test out this claim.

Setting up Cucumber to use ChromeDriver

To make the switch, all I had to do was replace the driver definition from:

Capybara.current_driver = :selenium 

to:

Capybara.register_driver :chrome do |app|
    Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, :browser => :chrome)
  end
Capybara.javascript_driver = :chrome

Then in all my Cucumber feature files, I added the tag @javascript:

Re-run Cucumber Feature Files

When I re-ran my Cucumber Features files using ChromeDriver, I however came across a few errors:

focusElement execution failed;
   Failed to send keys because cannot focus element (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnknownError)

Apparently, You can’t use send_keys for certain types of inputs. (Workaround – click the element and then use the advanced interactions API to send keys without an element.)

Element is not clickable at point (928, 23.5). Other element would receive the click

ChromeDriver always clicks the middle of the element in attempt to be faithful to what an actual user does. There are two ways to handle this currently:

• Change/fix the page so that the user can click on the link in the middle.
• Use the advanced user interactions API to click at the appropriate place in the link. e.g., ActionChains(w).move_to_element_with_offset(link, 0, 20).click().perform()

Speed Test Results: Firefox vs ChromeDriver

After fixing the issues above and passing all my tests, I was able to compare their speeds and found that ChromeDriver was 15 – 20% faster than Firefox. With a smaller testsuite, the difference might not make much of a difference but can you imagine the difference on a larger testsuite! In the end … you have to consider whether Chrome’s speedy performance is worth dealing with the issues that seem to be ChromeDriver specific.