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Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

polypane.app

71–80 of 141 posts

Re: Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

#74
post #17

I totally get why you do subscription. I totally get why I don't do subscription. Is there some sort of middle ground? Say, minimum purchase cost is the same price as six months, but it keeps on working afterwards sans updates. When the dev realizes that such a tool is only 80% effective unless it is totally updated, they can subscribe.

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 co…

If my users are using an old version of Chromium, I probably want to support that and test on it.

Re: Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

#75
post #6

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!

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!

Re: Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

#76
I understand the subscription model, but the cost doesn't sit right for me.

My all products JetBrains subscription is £137 a year, for every single product they create (and perpetual fallback licences). This is £91 a year, which is about 66% of the cost of my JB sub and if I stop paying, I assume PolyPane stops working.

Re: Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

#77
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your pricing model.

You have to sign up, and then this welcomes me: The password has to have: - At least one lowercase letter - At least one number - At least one uppercase letter - At least 8 characters I do not like it when websites (or applications, w/e) do this. I am somewhat OK with "at least 8 characters long" and I even understand its significance (from a security perspective) but not the rest.

Just use the browser's built in password suggestion.

Re: Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

#78

I totally get why you do subscription. I totally get why I don't do subscription. Is there some sort of middle ground? Say, minimum purchase cost is the same price as six months, but it keeps on working afterwards sans updates. When the dev realizes that such a tool is only 80% effective unless it is totally updated, they can subscribe.

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 s…

    - It's hard to convince my boss to create a subscription.
    - I don't want to become hostage to monthly payments - if I don't pay one month my whole workflow is messed over, so I have to continue (vs. otherwise I can slowly trade it out of my workflow, and/or look for alternatives)
    - Its hard for me to mentally grok how much I am paying monthly on subscriptions. 
    - I never cancel, because inertia.
    - I am not sure if this is something that justifies a monthly subscription, and two weeks is too little time for me to invest in changing my workflow to accommodate it.
    - I hate subscriptions (this is an emotional thing, so you could tell me to get a shrink. But I suspect I am not the only one).
I feel like I am missing even bigger reasons, but /rant

Re: Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers

#79
post #51

* What are a few features you offer over Browserstack? (re: x-browser testing). * Do you offer GenAI integrations? (Copilot, Claude, etc) (Help me sell this to my manager)

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, th…

Thank you for not adding AI slop to this.
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