Author of Polypane here. I’m a bootstrapped solo dev trying to make this work :) Cool to finally see it on HN. If you have any questions, happy to answer them!
I use this as part of my daily workflow as a frontend developer. It saves me a ton of time instead of messing around with chrome windows. I prefer this over Sizzy because of frequent updates and better synchronized scroll support.<p>I do wish the reloading time would be faster but I understand that when you reload 7-10 chromium windows at the same time, it's bound to be a bit slow.
It does what it says on the tin, multiple Chromium panes at once with different dimensions, actions apparently sync up and everything. Frankly, I'm surprised nobody has thought of this sooner!<p>Multiplatform support for Windows/Mac/Linux, which is to be expected, given the Chromium base. Not open source, unfortunately, and free for trial only.
This is maybe the 7th take on this multi-viewport browser in the past few years. Is there some hidden business model I'm missing to justify the number of similar projects?
I'm wondering about the business side of this. This tool sounds useful, but I bet that Mozilla could implement this quite easily if the market wants this, so why would a company pour resources into building something like this?<p>And as a user, I would probably miss the developer tools.
Anyone else find it painful scrolling through that site and waiting for the animations to reveal the next "block"?<p>They're smooth, but by the time they show up my eyes have moved on from the void where they had expected content to be. Coupled with the "marketingy" phrases it annoyed me enough to leave before I learned anything about what makes this browser special.<p>(Not knocking the tool, just the landing page)
I'd love to hear the details of why web developers like this feature? As opposed to say, clicking through the various dimensions in the responsive design mode? I guess the idea is seeing the changes live: So as you're fixing one aspect ratio, make sure you're not simultaneously breaking another?<p>If you're using something like Webpack, that supports hot reloading, couldn't you simulate this just by having multiple browser windows open, each displaying a different dimension size? So then is the idea that having to set that up manually each time is a pain?<p>(Not judging, just seeking to understand, I'm a huge fan of any kind of speed increase, but I'm curious if I'm missing anything here.)
So what happens when JS queries the size of something?<p>Is the answer only correct for one pane?<p>I can only imagine that this is a big source of pain once any JS gets involved. It doesn't sound like a very solvable problem.
The idea is amazing but couldn't stop thinking about the companies using it.<p>Google? Is there a reason I should believe they're using it instead of the very obvious internal tools?