TL;DR: Don't use refute with Capybara finders

Capybara's finders are written to assume that the thing you are checking for is
present on the page, and so will keep looking for it until it reaches it's
default timeout (which is currently set to 5 seconds). Therefor any use of a
"presence" finder (e.g. has_css?) to prove something is not on the page will add
a hefty delay in the running feature. Instead, the corresponding "absence"
finder (has_no_css?) can be used to avoid the delay.
Prevent waiting in Capybara presence finders

Because the Capybara finders and matches will block waiting for a matching
element to be found, these conditionals will sometimes block for 5 seconds. By
overriding the wait time so it is zero, we can speed up the cucumber features.
Merge pull request #1925 from alphagov/speed-up-features

Speed up features