Selenium CSS locators

We've got a project with quite a large set of tests, and we have both Firefox and IE7 continuous builds using selenium. The annoying thing is that something that takes 5 minutes in Firefox can take 30+ minutes with IE (I kid you not!).

It turns out this is a common problem and is due to the lack for native xpath support in IE. So for all the selenium tests that use xpath=//..... in IE the xpath is actually being evaluated using javascript ... ouch. An alternative is to use css locators, you can't do this everywhere but as well as improving the IE performance it can also provide some rather tidy rules. For example

xpath=//div[contains(@class,'balance')]
or
css=.balance

xpath=//div[@id,'topLeft')//span[contains(@class,'name')]  
or 
css=#topLeft .name

So even if you dont' care about IE using css selectors might be a lot nicer. (It might also improve your css skills!)