Postman announced the launch of Postman for the web, a new browser interface for Postman that offers users simplified access and superior collaboration. The move marks somewhat of a return to Postman’s original roots. Until today, Postman users have accessed Postman through a desktop application. Accessing Postman through the browser has been one of the most-requested features from users; they say that downloading a desktop app can slow down onboarding, and can also make it challenging to stay on the latest version. Plus, the browser approach allows certain collaboration capabilities that aren’t possible within the app. The web version of Postman solves these issues by providing the following:
- Simplified user access and onboarding: Users get instant access via browser with no app installation required, automatic updates, and faster user onboarding (i.e., just paste in the URL and go).
- Optimized collaboration through deep linking: Now that Postman is on the web, everything in Postman has a URL, so users can easily share URLs to granular API elements for superior collaboration.
- The ability to send requests at scale from the browser: A unique agent architecture, developed exclusively by Postman engineers, facilitates scalable sending of API requests from the browser.
Tightly connected to the Postman for the web client launch is the Postman agent. The agent was specifically designed to overcome the cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) limitations of browsers to allow for API requests to be scalably sent from a browser interface. By creating a proxy micro-application to facilitate API request-sending at scale, the agent addresses this browser challenge in a way that’s never been done before.
