The last time I checked .fire_event("onmouseover") had not been implemented (watir-webdriver) in at least Firefox (this was a few months ago now).
The way I currently get around this is by using the following:
In a file included in all my tests:
class Watir::Element
def hover
assert_exists
driver.action.move_to(@element).perform
end
end
This gives each element a hover method, which is used like:
browser.div(:id => "someId").hover
And that's how I've been handling hover events so far. This was suggested (provided) by Jari Bakken when I ran into a similar problem with .fire_event("onmouseover")
during a test.
I'm not sure whether this will work in IE, as we're only using Firefox here.