Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development
polypane.app
polypane.app
Your pricing page breaks completely when accessing it from Argentina where prices are "larger" (ej. "ARS 1,037.20" for the Individual plan).
Worse, I see no way to change the currency. You shouldn't assume that because I accessed from Argentina the price in Argentine Pesos is helpful for me (it isn't). You should provide a way to change the currency (normally people put it in the footer) or not try to match currency with visitors based solely on the geolocation of their IP address.
I rarely speak the language of the country I may be in atm.
I rarely use the currency of the country I may be in atm.
Please, do not try to be smart about these things.
Larger entities like Google can just send you into redirection hell sometimes if you try to set a language (where you can even find the option).
Others decline to show you the content since it is not "available in your part of the world" even though what you were doing was simply setting the language of the webpage, not changing its location in the world (I have been temporarily in the Netherlands now for a few months and this keeps happening on .nl domains!).
If the page is a for a SaaS, the pricing structure should allow me to select from all of the options they have. I do not want to be forced to only have prices in DKK, SEK, EURO or US if it is just tied to the location that the page thinks I am coming from.
Here I'm obviously excluding cases where the store/saas/service is location specific (i.e shop.se for Sweden for instance).
Unless manually disabled for privacy reasons (in which case... well yeah) your browser sends a weighted list of your language preferences with the HTTP request, the option on the site should only be an override.
> This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops.
Google follows the above language list unless your account or temporary session settings override it. Mom and pop probably don't know how to support more than one language let alone how to implement it well.
Having multiple TLDs is not mutually exclusive with putting the browser language list first. Not every browser has always supported the language list (certainly not when the google.tld names were originally registered) and the TLD can serve to do more than change the default language.
> which in turn support different languages.
They'll default to a different language for the region in absence of any other setting (language list, account preference, browser cookies) but it's not the function of the TLD to override this when the information is present.
> My preferred language is always English but Google normally redirects me to “Google Argentina” (.com.ar, in Spanish by default) from the .com based on my IP and I have to fight it to switch back to English.
Redirection to a different TLD is based off geo-ip not your language setting and done for more reasons than just to serve you a specific language in absence of other language info. You're really fighting Google thinking you (or possibly your account) is coming from Argentina and your browser possibly not sending a language list (or a fake one). I had to correct something similar once where the IP block I had been coming out of had previously been in use somewhere in Asia, I just gave updated info to this form https://support.google.com/websearch/workflow/9308722?hl=en and it was updated and stopped redirecting me. Of course if you actually are coming from Argentina then they won't update it.
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Rather than a bunch of talk though here is an actual demo of what I get browsing to google.com.ar using English in the browser UI but with with German set as my preferred language in the language list: https://i.imgur.com/N3XOSvg.png clearly .com.ar didn't default to serving the page in German on its own nor was there any history in the browser so the language list the browser sends is preferred over the TLD you load. I'd double check you don't have a privacy setting or extension stripping this info.
There must be some sort of sales benefit to it, otherwise websites wouldn't be doing it. I'm guessing the main advantage is when it gets the currency right, it's easier to buy the product.
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm.
That makes sense in a way. Managers tend to implement features nonsensically, as Hacker News constantly reminds me :-)
What would be the best compromise in your opinion, then: doing this magic automatically and giving the user an option, asking them up-front, etc. ...?
I had to translate a site into dozens of languages. Our German staff member translated the text. She would keep writing "e-mail" as "eMail" and I would change it back without her knowledge. Just recently I realized that the capitalization is a German quirk and is expected - it wasn't just a quirk of the translator. I feel bad for "fixing" her work now, simply because I didn't understand.
I can’t find any plausible correlation between the prices it’s presenting me (AUD745.40 billed annually for the business plan) and any base currency. The Individual-to-Business ratio suggests 9 and 39 units of currency per month, but which that would be, I don’t know. “Includes VAT” makes the whole thing a mess; European VAT is inapplicable in Australia, though if they do enough business here they should register for GST (and the procedure for skipping that taax is different, too: in Europe the buyer gives the seller their VAT ID and the seller removes the VAT charge, but in Australia the seller charges GST and business clients can claim it back from the Tax Office in their Business Activity Statement).
Making this worse, the page source has a JSON-LD block listing an aggregate price range of USD9–49, which I’m pretty sure is just flat-out wrong.
There are obviously still browser quirks that needed ironing out, but this got me a good way there in multiple screen sizes at the same time - seeing how a little change looks instantly across different screens was super helpful.
Edit: The dev was super responsive as well, I emailed about a bug that I found, and he emailed back a version to test with the fix in, with the full version being rolled out later in the week.
Can we go back to buying plain software licenses?
You can switch to alternative you host yourself. RocketChat or Element instead of Slack, Gitlab instead of Github, you name it. There are tons of open source and closed source alternative to all the cool hosted platforms if you dare look outside what everyone else is using.
This strategy incurs the cost of maintenance and management, which is why in many cases the hosted services are usually cheaper. Getting Gitlab on a $10 VPS isn't a problem, but getting regular backups, failovers, etc. is incredible difficult.
My personal developer burn rate is less than $50 per month. The company I work for doesn't even need pay for Docker's fancy account with higher limits because there's no need to, even if you run containers all day. You don't have to use all these expensive online services if you're willing to run some software in-house, but don't underestimate the cost of paying someone to set up all those cost-saving services.
Yes - there is some initial ramp up time and some hurdles to face (and I actually ended up going the self-hosted K8s route, which is definitely a lot of additional ramp up time, but IMO - worth it.)
That said... I save a LOT of money.
Currently hosting
- Bookstack
- Seafile
- Jellyfin
- Grocy
- Drone.io
- Gitlab
- Youtrack
- Keycloak
- OpenHab
~$50/year for dynamic dns. ~$15/year for hostnames. ~$5/year for backup and long term storage (this varies, but is often within the free tier on backblaze unless I have to restore a service).
Or about $5/month (not including the internet, which I already pay for anyways, and the hardware, which is literally my old/outdated machines running micro-k8s, and a NAS).
The maintenance can be annoying every now and then - but it's also the kind of work I don't really mind, and it's a nice exercise to stay up-to-date on tech I end up interacting with in the office anyways.
You can go to buying plain software licenses, but I most people don't bother.
Monthly licence fee: £5.36/month Annual: £39.07/yr Lifetime: £152.43
I would rather just pay a one off fee, maybe for a 2-3 year license.
I don't mind that it's not open source, it's made by an indie dev that's super responsive and really cares about helping people making better websites.
Keep it up, Kilian!
Browser, handling so much important stuff, being closed source is a bit of... just no.
Something being open source doesn't automatically mean it is secure. On the other hand, any software running on your pc requires you to put trust in the developers. I think it would be easier to just setup monitoring (like preventing outgoing traffic or identifying DNS lookups etc) and limiting permissions on what particular software can do, be it black or white box. White box of course allows running some analyzers, but... do any non-contributors actually do it?
I remember seeing some tool here, don't remember - was it Microsoft made or what? That scanned the code and tried to identify what accesses software makes.
I can already hear some of you starting to type a rant about how this actually is a C problem and not something that would happen in a modern language like ${YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE:-rust}; and to an extent it is true that C is especially vulnerable to this particular vector of attack, but like it or not a lot of open source software if it isn't written in C, depends on libraries that are. This includes the Linux kernel, OpenSSL, cURL. WebKit is written in C++ which might as well be C for the sake of this discussion. Other languages have other attack vectors, like the fractal-like dependency tree of NPM for example, something that has been demonstrated time and time again to be more than a hypothetical security risk.
Not calling you out directly OP (in fact, I quite like your project), but the subscription model is pretty badly thought out most of the time IMO. Especially in a commercial setting. You really should not have to pay a company a monthly fee to operate cameras you bought, on your property. These trojan horse subscriptions are then normally paired with other anti-people abuses, e.g. not allowing the user to use basic functionalities without the subscription.
> My site will still be online.
Just curious: what would happen if your website went offline? If your application is phoning home to verify a license, and the website comes back with an unexpected / no response (maybe you let the hosting run out), would the software still be usable? I think there should be more provisions against this sort of thing in subscription-payed applications.
On the other hand, non-subscription based software was only good as long as they were maintained for your current OS… So I don't care much if my software is subscription based or not, but I care a lot about them saving my data using open standards.
One alternative, I guess, are full-price major revisions at semi-regular intervals. But won't that result in many people never getting an upgrade because they feel it's not worth it?