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Comment by kilian | Hacker News Reader

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 built a prototype of something similar with iframes for a gig at eBay a decade ago. Ended up showing it off at the first React conf. Definitely useful to have as much immediate feedback as possible when you're developing.

Glad to see a productized version! Most of my work these days is for internal tools with fixed browser expectations, otherwise I'd probably be downloading a trial right now.

Congrats!

I recall using your product years ago and it was fantastic. It helped me work solo on a web app with ease. Not having CSS and JS skills like a lot of front end devs, it was nice knowing all viewports were handled.

Congrats Kilian!

Polypane made a massive difference in getting our startup's website shipped a few months ago. I highly recommend it for entrepreneur-devs.

Quick feedback: The "Polypane Portal" page hangs after opening it in Chrome on M1 Pro Macbook.

Can't seem to replicate that here (m4 macbook), but I'll keep it open for a bit and see what happens. Thanks for letting me know!

M1 Pro here too, the page doesn't hang, but it's extremely slow to scroll on my end.

M1 Max MacBook Pro and no issues, fwiw. Just to help provide data.

M1 Mac mini here and instant loading in Brave.

Scrolling is unusable on that page for me:

Computer: Apple M3 Max

macOS: 14.7.3 (23H417)

Google Chrome 134.0.6998.118

I also tried in my "clean" chrome profile (to rule out extensions) and it's still got really bad scroll lag. This happens as soon as I open the page.

Here is a video though I understand it's hard to convey since you can't see when/how much I'm scrolling. I can tell you I scrolled slowly down and back up consistently through this video.

https://cs.joshstrange.com/m71YtZdk

Even worse, I just found that having that tab open (and visible) makes Chrome (no other app) laggy everywhere. Something is definitely wrong with that page. Also that page was open in a different chrome profile and it still made my main chrome profile lag when just trying to click around the text area for this comment on HN.

Edit: Some extra details for my setup, I have external monitors (4) and the Macbook Pro is closed in clamshell mode. Not sure why either of those things would matter but I figure both those cases are more common for people on HN (external monitors/closed laptop) than the general public so I wanted to mention it.

Edit2: And here is a video of me doing the same scrolling on the homepage just to show the difference: https://cs.joshstrange.com/GWLr0Qwl

Can confirm, M1 Air 16 GB, Brave and macOS are up-to-date

Have any extensions installed that may be blocking requests?

same

It should be better now, as I made tweaks to the starfield canvas at the top of the page.

You have the Google logo on your landing page above the fold - what's the connection?

That was the first thing I noticed as well. OP can you answer?

Those are customers. Just like for example on netlify.com.

I had a title stating that for the longest time, then I noticed nearly all other landing pages simply have it without title and just a clean list of logos, so I changed it to that as well.

How and where is Google using Polypane?

Google has tens of thousands of engineers—one of them using Polypane at Google would be indicative of Polypane being used at Google.

If only a few engineers are using it out of their own volition that I don't think that justifies trying to imply that Google is a customer.

Pretty misleading and underhanded I think.

I work at one of those companies (not google) and Polypane is actively banned as “not safe, shouldn’t be used at all”.

Not to take away from the product, which does look cool, but the “customer list” is definitely sketchy.

Fair point. I'm just explaining how Polypane might have rationalized the positioning.

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!

Never heard of the product and just had a look at the landing page. Immediately spotted a typo :D

> On Mac, Window and Linux

should be

> On Mac, Windows and Linux

Shouldn’t it be macOS?

Apple would say that, but I think most Mac users would say Mac. I know I think so and I've been a lifelong user.

Well that’s embarrassing, thats been there for literal years.

At least the icons are right!

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.

zero relevance to the pricing.

Just use the browser's built in password suggestion.

For something not-so-serious I probably should, but my browser does not have one. :D

I don't. Nine dollars per month for an individual? No thanks. Charge what you like. It's your right to do that, but as a hobbyist there's no chance I'm buying.

Its a great tool and for a front end developer its reasonable.

I brought it to the hn frontpage again. Is this worth getting some free month? ;-)

Haha, email me and we’ll see

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