Claude Code Now Tests in the Browser Itself

Claude Code can now control Chrome through the official Claude Chrome Extension¹. This opens up two very different use cases.

One is web scraping and automation, meaning fetching data from websites, filling forms, automating research. Playwright MCP² has been available for this, but it has a drawback: Playwright launches a separate browser in headless mode, websites often detect it as a bot and block it.

The other use case is software development, and this is where it gets interesting. When developing web applications, the workflow has been the same for years: write code, open browser, click through, find bug, back to editor. Claude Code can now run this loop itself. The Chrome Extension runs in your real browser, with all cookies, all logins, access to console and network requests.

The console access in particular makes a difference. Before, I had to copy error messages from DevTools and paste them into Claude Code so the agent understands what’s going wrong. Now Claude Code reads the console itself, sees the stack trace, finds the faulty line and fixes it. That manual step disappears completely.

I tried it on a feature. Claude Code builds the component, opens Chrome, clicks through the UI, sees the error in the console, goes back to the code and fixes it. It won’t replace E2E test suites, but it opens up niche use cases that simply weren’t possible before. If you do web development, you should definitely try it.