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Comment by herpdyderp | Hacker News Reader

I wish such a browser could accurately emulate a mobile device's browser, not just change screen size, but even Apple's iOS simulator fails at this.

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There's a huge list of things Polypane emulates beyond the screen size.

For devices:

  - user agent
  - reported platform
  - device pixel ratio
  - rendering mode (mobile rendering and desktop rendering respond differently depending on your viewport meta tag)
  - default input device
  - orientation APIs

Beyond that it can also emulate reading direction, page language, browser locale, user-configured default font-size, different network settings and a whole range of different media queries like color-scheme, reduced-motion reduced-data, reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, forced-colors (windows high contrast mode) and color gamut. I'll be adding even more device browser-specific emulations later this year.

Oh I wasn't even thinking about those things, but that's really cool! I was thinking more about different CSS implementation behavior, though that's less of a mobile-specific issue and more of a "every browser is different" issue.

I don't have a list of differences off the top of my head, but I regularly find big enough differences that I don't rely on "responsive mode" or even (as mentioned) Apple's iOS simulator (because it does not accurately replicate the real on-iPhone browser rendering, which has bitten me before).

Using Polypane doesn't mean you can skip out on testing other rendering engines. That's such an important point that I even mention it on the homepage!

So yeah, you should be testing (mobile) Safari and Firefox too. Chrome on android has some different APIs compared to Chrome on desktop, but rendering is identical.

When developing your site, you can use Polypane Portal[1] to tunnel your local site to real devices while keeping them fully in sync with what you do in Polypane, so you can scroll, interact, inspect and even edit across real devices from inside Polypane, saving you a ton of time.

[1] https://polypane.app/portal/

I must admit i can't argue the subscription for polypane, if we already have browserstack subscription.

And only polypane that dont support other engines then also don't work.

This reasoning misses a very large portion of Polypane, which is that you use it while developing, not just testing. It's a replacement for your time in Chrome/Firefox/Safari, not your time testing across devices (real or through online tooling like Browserstack).

It does however minimise that device testing time. So it all depends on how valuable that time is for you.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those all things chromium gives you for free? I open the inspector right here, click the devices button, and I can set all those

Yes. This is a fancy electron browser.

I would love to know counter points instead of just down voting. I guess not being on the gravy train doesn't satisfy the paid for advertisement.

Can it emulate email rendering?

You need a farm of machines that run the actual mail clients, to do that reliably. https://www.emailonacid.com/ is such a service.

I hate this so much. I don't want to do this, as its not cost efficient for development

no I'm not touching that can of worms with a ten foot pole. Someone braver than me can build that!

No need, nowadays sites just guess you're on a phone if you resize the browser window too narrow and whinge at you to "use a desktop device or use our app for the best experience".

> "use a desktop device or use our app for the best experience".

Plot twist: their "app" is just the same site wrapped in a webview, minus the nags to install the app.

Plus autostart on boot and daily notifications.

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