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!
Maybe a bit of a weird question but I'm curious: What's the reason behind this being it's own entire browser? Like, if I were given the task of implementing this I would try to avoid creating a new browser (because it sounds like a lot of work). But I know that doing "weird things" like that sometimes causes you to hit a lot more roadblocks than expected and I'm curious to hear the technical story behind this!
I don't tend to think of forking Chromium as a new browser. I imagine that Chrome devtools aren't part of the browser extension API they provide, so creating something would have to start at a lower level.
They are on Firefox at least, I assume Chrome too, there's a Vue devtools extension for example that adds a tab alongside inspect, console, debugger, et al. to give you a sort of Vue-aware 'inspect'.
A browser extension would be the other option, but those are severely limited in what they can do and the regular browser model is not built with multiple panes in mind.
To do everything I want to do (like css media query breakpoint defection) I needed something more low-level.
If you’re still on their trial period, try Polypane as well and see which one you like better, that’s the quickest way to find out.
I think Polypane has more features but those can be copied (and are). With Polypane my goals is not to provide some fun tool, but to make you a better and more productive developer. More productive so you spend less time to get the same result, but better in that you’ll spend less time and end up with a more accessible and performant site.
So you’ll find a lot of features for things that are often overlooked and make those really easy to use, like accessibility tooling, or live reloading that works for any environment with zero configuration.
The latest addition in that area is that I wrote a completely custom element inspector that works across all panes at the same time and makes it really easy to edit styling and properties, live updated in all panes. It’s a joy to use and a major productivity boost.
Yeah I am often highly suspicious of these things saying "company X uses this!" - I've seen a few of those listing the Big Co where I had been working at the time was listed where it definitely was not in-use (and in one case the software was actually banned from expensing/licensing despite being listed on the vendor's site)
