Most devs who use something like Postman in their normal workflow would prefer a standalone client (or cli).

I'm working on something a bit orthogonal, but similar in spirit: a “network requests” tool, similar to the Network tab in Devtools, but batteries included and working _both_ as a browser extension and a reverse proxy standalone app – so you just pick whatever suites your workflow better today. It's still super early stage though.

In Firefox dev tools you can replay and modify requests which isn’t something I’ve found in chromium browsers.

Why would I use a browser developer tool to test an API? A browser is wholly uninvolved in API development.

because the browser is literally the HTTP client. why would you need to use something else for a very specific case of HTTP protocol interaction ?

Because a browser is not the HTTP client.

It still makes calls, and a proper REST client means you can make POST/PUT/etc on command

That's only true if you aren't testing in prod