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[MVP] My idea on how to reproduce web app bugs a little easier

Hi, my name is Dima
I would like to share my thoughts on web testing and bug reproducibility issues.

TLDR;
My own solution: https://browserbox.netlify.app/

Part 1. Problem
I was doing some work recently and the thought came to me. There were bugs in the Jira backlog that needed to be fixed. Not all of them were easy to repeat, such as the safari bugs, and some were persistently reproduced only on certain machines of certain people. The problem began to emerge: How to create bugs so that they are easy to reproduce and how to quickly watch a bug fix in different browsers. Thinking about what to do with it, how to make people create bugs so that they would be easy to repeat later, I started looking for a solution to the problem.

Part 2. Finding a solution
The first solution was cloud services, saucelabs and browserstack. There you can record a video of the bug and share this video. Also there you can choose the browser configuration you need.

After playing with the saucelabs along with other team members, I realized that the saucelabs have 3 critical flaws that I have not resolved

  1. Speed. Every request from my computer to saucelabs goes through half the world, the speed leaves much to be desired.
  2. What should I do if I want to follow the link from the dev environment, which is not available anywhere except my computer. Perhaps saucelabs or browser stack does it somehow, but I did not find an easy way.
  3. Expensive

The second option was to run browsers locally. But there were also problems. What to do if you need a safari, and I have Windows. How to keep track of browser versions, how to repeat a bug on an old version of chrome, for example, there is a way, but it's not an easy job. And most importantly, how can I make sure that the person who created the bug in Jira and I will use the same browser and its configuration, how can I be sure that if my bug does not repeat itself, it’s because it has already been fixed, and not because I’m not using that browser version / I don't have some kind of extension that they forgot to indicate in the bug.

And then I got the following vision that I want to have

  1. Something that will be fast. Desirable all 3 major browsers (chrome, firefox, safari) locally on my Windows machine.
  2. From these browsers you can go to the local environment and watch the fix instantly and not deploy it to the test environment, then open it from the saucelabs.
  3. Cheap, preferably free
  4. You can easily switch between different versions of browsers.

Part 3. I make my own solution.
I found that you can launch browsers locally thorough playwright. It allows me to run safari, firefox, and chrome on my Windows machine.
I made a small UI util, which runs all 3 browsers on Windows, and most importantly, with the help of it, we can come to one solution how to make bugs reproduce or at least make the life of a web developer a little easier. It solves the first 3 problems. It does not solve the fourth problem. This is worth thinking about

This utility is available through npm. Here you can read more and try it at the same time
https://browserbox.netlify.app/
I also created a discord server, the link to the invite can also be found at the link above
This is an MVP, I'm looking forward to the feedback

Thanks for reading

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