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?
My Uni has site licenses for many products such as Snagit 2025 and if I want a license for that the skids are greased. You did everything right from the viewpoint of an early adopter, in the future I guess your sales people could talk to our Central IT and negotiate something, if you send me an email I could try to find out how you would talk to.
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.
And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews. Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b test it before release thinking "no way that's what users would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.
My problem with turning it of is that if you _do_ want to watch the preview it's very cumbersome. Clicking on it goes to the movie/episode. So to get to the preview you have to go to the list of Episodes, scroll down (and try not to get spoiled) to trailers then play it. So I have one profile with it on and one with it off, depending on if I'm browsing or not.
100%. Wasn’t trying to contradict your statement - just giving some additional context.
And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also streams on twitch but I’m not on that site so I can’t say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.
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.
You can simulate mobile screens, toggle light/dark/print/other media modes, edit css, debug layout, run a11y and lighthouse tests, and download all the framework-specific devtools you want.
Besides the multi-pane synced windows I don't really see a new feature here. It's a lot of advertising of little-known features that are already built-in to Firefox
I'm not trying to shit on your product. It seems polished and possibly useful. It just seems insincere for you to advertise browser features that are built in as features of your app specifically
> 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?
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)
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)
That doesn't change the meaning. It's not trivial to execute well on an idea, test a wide swath of use cases and edge cases, and release a high quality product.
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.
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.
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?