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title: Trowser - Rikard Edgren | Show 032 | daily.dev
description: Rikard Edgren, author of &#x27;The Little Black Book of Test Design&#x27;, discusses Trowser — a free, AI-enabled browser built specifically for software testers. Built...
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# Trowser - Rikard Edgren | Show 032

**[Evil Tester](https://daily.dev/sources/eviltester)** · 55 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Rikard Edgren, author of 'The Little Black Book of Test Design', discusses Trowser — a free, AI-enabled browser built specifically for software testers. Built on Chromium using C#, Trowser integrates testing utilities like accessibility checks (axe-core), network interception, request/response mocking, and a REST API that allows both human testers and LLMs to operate the browser simultaneously. Edgren explains how AI excels at security testing and detail-oriented exploration but lacks strategic coverage thinking. The conversation covers the philosophy of system-level testing vs. code-level testing, the limitations of commercial AI test tools, tips for prompting LLMs effectively (e.g., giving opposite instructions to counteract AI 'pleasing' behavior), and why purpose-built tester tools matter. Both speakers emphasize that human judgment, variation, and deep understanding of what software is supposed to do remain essential even as AI augments testing workflows.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.eviltester.com/show/032-trowser-rikard-edgren>

## Questions this post answers

### What is Trowser and how does it help with software testing?

Trowser is a free Windows-only browser built specifically for software testers, created by Rikard Edgren. It wraps Chromium and is written in C#, bundling testing utilities like axe-core accessibility checks, network interception, header and user-agent modification, and script injection directly into the browser. It exposes a rich local API so an AI agent, such as one running through Cursor with Claude, can drive the same browser session as the human tester for concurrent or comparative exploratory testing.

_Testers exploring AI-assisted browser tooling can track new releases like Trowser on daily.dev._

### Why does an AI agent perform particularly well at security testing compared to other testing tasks?

AI-driven exploratory testing tends to excel at security testing because it is attentive to detail, doesn't get bored, and can probe far more input variations and payloads than a human tester in the same time. Rikard Edgren found that after building a general testing tool, its AI integration surprised him by finding security issues better than he could himself, though a human is still needed to evaluate and act on results, since a mediocre security tester's role is increasingly at risk.

_Teams weighing AI's role in security testing can follow real practitioner experiences like this on daily.dev._

### Why might a tester choose not to write unit tests for their own testing tool?

Rikard Edgren deliberately kept unit test coverage at zero for Trowser because past experience taught him that unit and integration tests consumed more time than they saved and rarely caught real bugs; actual bugs surfaced only when he used the tool in practice. Instead he relies on a roughly 35-second internal smoke pass built into Trowser itself, planning to add deeper automated tests only once the feature set stabilizes.

_Developers debating test coverage tradeoffs on side projects can weigh similar experiences on daily.dev._

## Similar posts on daily.dev

- [Is This the Future of E2E Testing? How AI Automates Browser Tests from Plain English Requirements](https://daily.dev/posts/is-this-the-future-of-e2e-testing-how-ai-automates-browser-tests-from-plain-english-requirements-yx39zejmr) · This is Angular · 1 upvotes · 0 comments
- [BrowserBook: The Browser Automation IDE](https://daily.dev/posts/browserbook-the-browser-automation-ide-1g8nhhxs2) · Product Hunt · 51 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#testing](https://daily.dev/tags/testing)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/trowser---rikard-edgren-show-032-hdo1cqcyz)

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