Selenium 2 does not require the Java proxy server. That was one of the top complaints with Selenium 1, so we got rid of it. :-) The Selenium 2 Ruby bindings are

Selenium 2 does not require the Java proxy server. That was one of the top complaints with Selenium 1, so we got rid of it. :-) The Selenium 2 Ruby bindings are very good these days and have just as much overhead as Watir (that is to say, not much).