Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

Congrats Kilian!

Polypane made a massive difference in getting our startup's website shipped a few months ago. I highly recommend it for entrepreneur-devs.

I recall using your product years ago and it was fantastic. It helped me work solo on a web app with ease. Not having CSS and JS skills like a lot of front end devs, it was nice knowing all viewports were handled.

I built a prototype of something similar with iframes for a gig at eBay a decade ago. Ended up showing it off at the first React conf. Definitely useful to have as much immediate feedback as possible when you're developing.

Glad to see a productized version! Most of my work these days is for internal tools with fixed browser expectations, otherwise I'd probably be downloading a trial right now.

Congrats!

You have the Google logo on your landing page above the fold - what's the connection?

I love the idea of the product, I could have definitely used it in the past. And I really love your responses to questions asked here. You're very honest and friendly. If I get into webdev again, I'll definitely give Polypane a shot!

Quick feedback: The "Polypane Portal" page hangs after opening it in Chrome on M1 Pro Macbook.

I like your pricing model.

I brought it to the hn frontpage again. Is this worth getting some free month? ;-)

There's a huge list of things Polypane emulates beyond the screen size.

For devices:

  - user agent
  - reported platform
  - device pixel ratio
  - rendering mode (mobile rendering and desktop rendering respond differently depending on your viewport meta tag)
  - default input device
  - orientation APIs

No need, nowadays sites just guess you're on a phone if you resize the browser window too narrow and whinge at you to "use a desktop device or use our app for the best experience".

Such as?

[flagged]

This feels like a lay-up, but here you go :) https://polypane.app/docs/emulation/#emulation-or-simulation

Polypane doesn't simulate the specific rendering engine of other browsers, it just pretends to be another browser (which is what emulation is) so you can test that the code you wrote for those browsers (for example, a polyfill) responds well. You'll still need to test in those real browsers to check against their rendering bugs or support gaps. (but something like Polypane portal[1] can make that step much easier)

[1] https://polypane.app/docs/portal/

Polypane is a chromium-based browser that you install on your own device and use while building applications that lets you develop at different (emulated) devices and screensizes/variation in one overview, with a bunch of development, accessibility and quality tools built right in.

Browserstack is an online device testing tool where you check if your site works on different real devices one-by-one. That is to say, they don't really compete: if you don't have real devices to test with then Browserstack is an excellent option.

What users mostly find is that by using Polypane (fast, local) they have far less use of Browserstack (slow, online) and the entire process speeds up. There will always be a need for real device testing.

There's no gen AI integrations, and I don't have any planned. You can happily use Claude or CoPilot in the browse panel though (which is a little browser that lives inside Polypane, so you can browse without losing the context of your project)

I would be OK with payed upgrades but a subscription is a big no-no.

True! I’d love to hear from someone who tried out both and settled on one.

The top comment from the last time this was submitted pointed to an open source (AGPLv3) implementation <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29340887> but I don't know how they compare feature-wise

Chromium

Its free for students through the GitHub Student Developer Pack :)

Happy to answer this. Polypane is a browser. If you don't keep your browser rendering engine up to date, you're opening yourself to a whole host of security issues (not to mention just generally diverging from what your end users use). Keeping that rendering engine up to date means dealing with a slew of potentially breaking changes with each new chromium version.

So there's two reasons:

1. The only way to do that continuous upkeep of the rendering engine that I have found to be sustainable is with a subscription.

2. I definitely don't want to be responsible for people using years-old versions of Chromium.

I liked the old "pay for updates" model. Nowadays, that seems less viable because security updates are so important[0]. I think the middle ground model would be something like security updates are free, feature updates cost money. Something like pay $x for version n+1 or a discounted rate for a subscription.

Sounds like a bit of a hassle on the logistics/release engineering side, though. That would need to be handled with some care and planning.

[0] Which I'll admit I don't 100% buy, but I'd love for a security expert to weigh in.

Maybe it could work similar to how Bitwig licenses work – you buy a license with a year of updates and it's yours – after the year expires you can download binaries for the latest version you're entitled to. Later you can buy access to the current version with an another year of updates (at a lower price) when you've decided that they've added something new you want.

Why don't you do subscription?

I've heard plenty of arguments on the 'financial tools to manage them are bad' (forget about them, hard to cancel) but few against 'paying money proportional to how much I use the product'. As a general concept that seems reasonable to me - if you use a product for 10 years, it's fair to pay more than somebody who uses it for a couple of months.

In a world where finance improves (more subs via Apple Pay et al, more banks like Revolut that show & allow unilaterally blocking any given recurring charge) would you still avoid them?

I guess that when people usually talk about paid browsers, they talk about separate web engines not chromium forks. If this will help with the battle against Google's dominance.