Polypane 25.1 is now available, and it brings DRM support through Widevine, a new reopen last closed tab feature and a number of improvements and fixes.
What's Polypane? Polypane is the browser for web developers who care about their craft and their users. It's a chromium-based stand-alone browser for Mac, Windows and Linux that shows sites in multiple synced panes and helps you make your site more responsive, more accessible and faster.
DRM support
Polypane 25.1 adds support for DRM through Widevine, which means you can now watch and listen to DRM protected content in Polypane. It took a few starts and stalls to get Widevine integrated into Polypane properly without compromising on the security of Polypane, but it's here now.
That black rectangle when making a screenshot is the DRM protection in action.
We want to thank the team at CastLabs for their responsiveness and willingness to change their build process to get this working, as well as Mike Maietta for his help integrating the required features into our build system.
Reopen last closed tab
You can now re-open closed tabs with ⇧ ⌘ T.
It won't help you build better websites, but it should save you some time when you accidentally close a tab you didn't mean to close. It's a small feature, but one that we hope will make your life just a little bit easier.
Show only Links with issues
The links outline now has an option to show only broken links so you can focus on just the links that have issues. This is especially useful for large pages with many links, as it allows you to quickly identify and fix broken or problematic links without having to scroll through all the working ones.
Form autofilling improvements
Our form autofilling feature makes it really easy to quickly fill out an entire form with realistic data, but it also filled in hidden inputs. Since those are often used to communicate extra data to the server, this could cause issues.
Starting from 25.1 we leave those hidden inputs alone, which should make form autofilling more reliable. Thanks Mathieu for the request!
Elements panel fixes
We added support for comments in our 25.0.1 release, but in doing so accidentally broke support for inspecting web component internals in the Elements panel. This has been fixed, so you can now inspect shadow DOMs again. Thanks Mark for making us aware of this!
We've also fixed an issue where some CSS wouldn't be shown because we couldn't parse the oklch color space correctly. Later this year we will roll out even more wide color space support across the app.
Meta panel improvements
The meta panel now warns you when a robots meta tag prevents indexing. While we already tested against your robots.txt, we now also test against the contents of the meta tag. Thanks Laurent for the suggestion!
We've also solved various bugs that occurred for some people like the app freezing when trying to hide social media previews (Thanks George!), more robust testing of structured data (Thanks Laurent!) and a fix for microdata not always being shown despite being detected.
Get Polypane 25.1
Polypane is available for Windows, Mac and Linux in 64 bit and ARM versions.
Polypane automatically updates on Mac, Windows and on Linux when using the AppImage. Otherwise, go to the download page to download the latest version!
Don't have Polypane yet? There is a 14 day trial available.
Try it for free. No credit card needed.
Polypane 25.1.1 Changelog
Improvements
- Improved Prevent permission popups for DRM requests
Fixes
- Fix DRM: Fix Spotify playback on Mac
- Fix Color contrast now takes color-scheme settings into account (Thanks Karthik!)
- Fix Elements panel: using arrow keys while editing attributes could result in the attribute being deleted
- Fix Elements panel: Fix issue where shadow root couldn't be selected (Thanks Mark!)
- Fix Elements panel: Show child nodes for elements that only have a shadowRoot as direct child
Polypane 25.1 Changelog
New
- New DRM support through Widevine
- New Reopen last closed tab feature
Improvements
- Improved Outline panel: Show only links with issues option (Thanks Anthony!)
- Improved Form outline: prevent form element rows from being too tall
- Improved Meta panel: Shows warning when a robots meta tag prevents indexing (Thanks Laurent!)
- Improved Guides: Split view layout now has enough space for the vertical ruler
- Improved Form autofilling no longer changes hidden fields (Thanks Mathieu!)
- Improved Prevent generated screenshot names from becoming too long
- Improved Polypane Peek: hide contrast value if no contrast is available
- Improved Elements panel: Expand elements in the tree view if they have text content and pseudo elements (Thanks Laurent!)
- Improved Extensions: Find extensions now opens in new tab
- Improved Quick Start: shortcuts now no longer change when emulating different operating systems (Thanks Damien!)
- Improved Updated list of Google Fonts
- Improved Updated Chromium to 138.0.7204.157
Fixes
- Fix Elements panel: Show shadowRoot contents again (Thanks Mark!)
- Fix Elements Panel: parsing of oklab/oklch text-shadows in elements panel and tooltips
- Fix Guides: NaN values in guides for vertical ruler in split layout
- Fix Closing popups in focus and full mode reopens devtools again (thanks Karl!)
- Fix Adjusted panel text size was only applied in the first tab (Thanks Laurent!)
- Fix Meta panel: catch errors when parsing faulty microdata (Thanks Laurent!)
- Fix Meta panel: Now show microdata when available on its own rather than together with RDFa
- Fix Meta panel: App freeze when trying to hide social media previews (Thanks George!)
