kilian

The point isn't showing what they look like, it's that the result is randomized. Screenshots aren't, so that kind of defeats the purpose.

The article starts with instructions on how to actually see and interact with the demos (the easiest is to use https://polypane.app ), as well as a video showing all the demos from the article running in Polypane.

Apparently the cable to the screen is to blame and the workaround is a piece of tape to block UV light reaching that component: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1qlyq3s/this...

Personally, I've found that just moving the screen out of the sun (for example by turning it upside-down, or holding my hand in front of it) when refreshing a page is enough to prevent it.

The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple's 'single 20y/o in sf' design.

Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say, you have a personal account and a shared account with your partner) has to do the "pick between the two identical looking top 20px of cards" dance every time they use Wallet to pay for something. It is mind-boggling that the current UI persists.

Hey, Polypane founder here hoping to get feedback and iterate ;)

Needing to fill in the paperwork for a saas is a PITA. Is there anything I could add to the site or elsewhere that would have made that easier for you?

A short, compressed, small video that's edge-cached beats always out a 4K stream, so it even works as a tactic to keep you in that overview longer.

This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.

This reasoning misses a very large portion of Polypane, which is that you use it while developing, not just testing. It's a replacement for your time in Chrome/Firefox/Safari, not your time testing across devices (real or through online tooling like Browserstack).

It does however minimise that device testing time. So it all depends on how valuable that time is for you.

Sure. Chromium is an evergreen browser, which means it's continuously patched and updated in the background. Getting a pinned Chromium version takes quite a lot of work, and really only happens in very specific, controlled environments.

If you happen to work in such an environment you have vastly different considerations from the other 99% of developers building websites and apps on the public facing web.

It just seems insincere for you to advertise browser features that are built in as features of your app specifically

Sorry but I honestly don't understand this line of reasoning. Advertising a product having a feature in no way means claiming other products do not have the same or similar features.

I could list dozens of things not in Firefox, Chrome or any other browser that Polypane has (and in fact, you list off a few that definitely aren't in Firefox. ) but even so, listing the features a specific product has is the whole point of a marketing website.

Do you also expect Apple to list HP and Acer laptop alongside their Macbooks because those also have screens and keyboards, or otherwise it would be insincere they advertise (on their own marketing website) the screen of a Macbook?

It should be better now, as I made tweaks to the starfield canvas at the top of the page.

I don’t see how you can come to that conclusion with even a superficial reading of the homepage, unless you count ‘shows web pages’ as ‘almost all features’.

And even then the homepage only lists about 30% of what Polypane does.

Well that’s embarrassing, thats been there for literal years.

At least the icons are right!

I hired Igalia to work on Chromium recently. Give me a month or two ;)

I explain my reasoning elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43472234

Those are customers. Just like for example on netlify.com.

I had a title stating that for the longest time, then I noticed nearly all other landing pages simply have it without title and just a clean list of logos, so I changed it to that as well.

Haha, email me and we’ll see

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

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)

Can't seem to replicate that here (m4 macbook), but I'll keep it open for a bit and see what happens. Thanks for letting me know!

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/

Yeah, just like Dropbox is two curls duct-taped to an SD card.

no I'm not touching that can of worms with a ten foot pole. Someone braver than me can build that!

Using Polypane doesn't mean you can skip out on testing other rendering engines. That's such an important point that I even mention it on the homepage!

So yeah, you should be testing (mobile) Safari and Firefox too. Chrome on android has some different APIs compared to Chrome on desktop, but rendering is identical.

When developing your site, you can use Polypane Portal[1] to tunnel your local site to real devices while keeping them fully in sync with what you do in Polypane, so you can scroll, interact, inspect and even edit across real devices from inside Polypane, saving you a ton of time.

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

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.

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

Hey, I'm Kilian, the creator and solo developer of Polypane. Exciting to see this on the homepage again.

Happy to answer any questions folks have!

Years ago I made https://fuckyeahkeming.com/ with the same premise. It had some good ones but after some time it’s just repeats of the same few words/letter combos for the funny ones: li becoming u, cl becoming d.

Other common issues are text being printed in the wrong font (using default letter shapes but the wrong kerning info), missing spaces (“me at” to “meat”) or poor tracking, which is excess space applied to all letters.

I stopped because it started feeling pedantic rather than funny.

Very cool. I recently implemented my own accessibility tree visualization [1] Yours is very interesting, getting away from the tree itself to a visualization more focused on grouping discrete units.

My thinking was to show the entire structure and through that help people focus on a logical flow through the page. Flipping that around and thinking of the tree as a set of discrete blocks, where the cohesion inside each block is more important, is very interesting.

Happy to chat if you want to compare notes!

[1] https://polypane.app/blog/polypane-20-1-the-accessibility-tr...

There is a proposal for that too: https://site.spawning.ai/spawning-ai-txt but it's wholly unclear if AI companies actually do something with this or if it's just wishful thinking...

Some AI companies follow robots.txt (OpenAI and Google, for example) but others ignore it. There's also other limitations around using robots.txt to sole this problem: https://searchengineland.com/robots-txt-new-meta-tag-llm-ai-...

That's pretty cool! Get ready to keep these up to date monthly or become obsolete quickly.

One of the downsides of tools like this is that your URL needs to be available online so if there's an issue, your iteration loop is quite long.

In Polypane [1] I've built social media previews that work with any local URL but also let you overwrite that URL for the social media that display those. I built (and frequently maintain) previews for X/Twitter, Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, Discord, Mastodon, Discord, Google Search, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. For all of those I have the design for their light and dark mode so you really can test everything. It also tells you what's missing and what is incompatible. Check it out: https://polypane.app/social-media-previews/

[1] https://polypane.app/