Polypane — A Review
I tested a developer-oriented browser called Polypane for a few weeks. Here are my thoughts.
A while back, a good friend/colleague/mentor of mine told me about this neat little piece of technowizardry called Polypane, which is a browser built by developers, for developers. Actually, it’d probably be more accurate to say it was by by A developer. Seriously. Dude is the founder, developer, designer, and support team behind Polypane. Honestly pretty impressive.
It becomes even more impressive when you take a dive into the list of features this browser offers. A quick glance at the product tour page, and you’ll discover it’s damn near a mile long. Here are just a couple of the things it can do:
Multiple viewing panes, so you never have to resize your browser
Syncs all interactions between panes
Zero-hassle device emulation
Dark mode testing
Have your documentation on the side as a separate internal browser instance
Automatic CSS breakpoint detection
A massive list of custom debugging tools for each pane
Social media and meta info previews
Automatic link issue detection
Full page screenshots
And so much more! This list hardly covers everything this browser’s capable of.
Anyway, I had the joy of testing it for two weeks, and while I wish I could say I was able to use everything, I barely scratched the surface becase there’s just SO MUCH this thing can do. I’m sure that eventually I’ll be able to say I’ve tested every feature it offers, but that won’t be for a while.
Over the course of the two week trial, I can confidently say that it’s helped to speed up my workflow by a significant enough margin that paying for the subscription is beyond worth it. Polypane’s most basic feature — multiple panes on one browser instance — has proven to be the most beneficial for me when working closely with my design team. I’m able to showcase how their designs will look on a wide variety of screen sizes without having to tab over to emulators or resize my screen or toggle between mobile and desktop views, it’s all just right there, allowing us to quickly and efficiently iterate through a new design mockup.
Oh, and the accessibility features! Chef’s kiss. It’s probably my favorite part of Polypane. Being able to just automatically detect and test for a wide variety of accessibility issues without having to install third party plugins or extensions, it’s honestly a godsend. As you know, I’m a huge believe in accessible-first design, so being able to have these features integrated seamlessly into my workflow, and objectively having more accessibility tests and better dev interaction out-of-the-box than even some of the top accessibility tools (yeah that’s right, I’m looking at you, SiteImprove), has been such a major benefit. Honestly? I’d fork over the $9/mo just for that alone.
Now all that being said, I do have to be objective here — Polypane isn’t without its quirks. However, I really only have two gripes with it.
The first, and arguably largest of the two, is the load time. I’ve tested it on a variety of devices with a wide range of power, and in every case the load times can be a tad atrocious. Of course, it’s all balanced out in the end because I can avoid having to switch rendering sizes or adjust my browser, but I really wish Polypane would load and render just a hair more efficiently. Honestly that could also just be my attention span screaming like a coked up squirrel strapped to a SpaceX rocket. I need to stay off TikTok.
The second is that it only uses the Blink rendering engine, as it’s built off of Chromium. So I still have to do cross-browser testing to ensure everything is consistent but I’d have to still do that anyway, with or without Polypane. I’m sure it’d be possible to go the route of Lunascape and have the three major rendering engines built into it and switchable through a context menu, but at this stage in Polypane’s lifecycle it’s far too late for that — Blink is at Polypane’s very foundation.
Anywho, after having used Polypane for a couple weeks, I can safely say it’s found a new home as an important part of my workflow, and I am DEFINITELY going to be picking up a personal license for it at the very least.
With all of that being said, I feel that it’s important to note that not a single part of this review was paid for, requested, sponsored, or anything. Kilian doesn’t even know I exist. I just felt so strongly about how great of a browser Polypane is, that I figured I’d write a bit about it, and hopefully guide another developer into making the right decision. This shit seriously rocks, give it a try.