When your working with selenium tests in rspec you might want to run them in multiple browsers. The basic code generated by the selenium ide tool doesn't quite cover it and I couldn't find a good solution on google or stackoverflow, so here's mine: First you need a Rakefile that can start & stop selenium-rc and you need a task to run all the spec files. Start and stop tasks are covered in the documentation for the selenium-client gem. To that I've added a list of browsers to test, in my file FireFox, Google Chrome & Internet Explorer, and a rake task that runs the same specs for all browsers, the current settings for cucumber and spec generates a lot of text in it's output so you might want to clean it up a bit. Also I pass the browsers to use to the spec files in a environment variable, there might be better ways of doing it but it works and was the fastest way of getting it done.

#Rakefile
require 'selenium/rake/tasks'
require 'rake'
require 'rake/testtask'
require 'spec/rake/spectask'

selenium_jar_file_path  = './tools/test/selenium-server-1.0.3/selenium-server.jar'
browsers = ["*firefox", "*googlechrome", "*iexplore"]

desc "start the selenium-rc server"
Selenium::Rake::RemoteControlStartTask.new("rc") do |rc|
  rc.port = 4444
  rc.timeout_in_seconds = 2 * 60
  rc.background = true
  rc.wait_until_up_and_running = true
  rc.jar_file = selenium_jar_file_path
end

Selenium::Rake::RemoteControlStopTask.new("rc:stop") do |rc|
  rc.host = "localhost"
  rc.port = 4444
  rc.timeout_in_seconds = 3 * 60
end

task :selenium_spec_wrapper do
  browsers.each do |browser|
    ENV['s_browser'] = browser
    rake_system("spec spec/*_spec.rb")
  end
end

task :default => [:rc, :selenium_spec_wrapper, "rc:stop"]

In the before(:all) there the client driver is setup I get the environment variable set by the buildscript and use it, the fallback to *firefox is there to use when the script i run from my ide or just by spec.

#spec file
  before(:all) do
    @verification_errors = []
    @selenium_driver = Selenium::Client::Driver.new \
      :host => "localhost",
      :port => 4444,
      :browser => if ENV['s_browser'].nil? == false
					ENV['s_browser']
				else
					"*firefox"
				end,
      :url => 'http://localhost:3000/sommarkort/',
      :timeout_in_second => 20
  end