Trowser - The Software Tester's Browser with Rikard Edgren

On his first day as a tester in 1998, Rikard Edgren was handed a paper test case for the Swedish version of Internet Explorer 4 Service Pack 2. A veteran tester named Anders told him not to follow the written steps. Get to the same end result, Anders said, but take a different path—use the keyboard, do something else in between. Microsoft wrote the steps that way to make the test cases easier to produce, not because they expected strict adherence. "That small thing has formed my whole testing career," Edgren says. "To do variations, to be observant, to not follow rules strictly. Instead follow the intent and the purpose and discover things about the software."

That philosophy now drives Trowser, a browser Edgren built specifically for testing. It is a standard Chromium browser at its core, but instead of bookmarks and browsing history, it ships with built-in testing tools: the Axe core library for accessibility checks, a network interception dialog for mocking requests and responses, and a rich REST API that lets an LLM control the same browser session a human tester is using. The design is not to replace the tester, but to make testing faster and more convenient. "It's nothing spectacularly new in Trowser," Edgren says, "but it's convenient and it combines things so you can do it faster, and then you will do it."

How Trowser changes the testing workflow