Switching to Polypane

Switching to a new browser can take effort. You're used to the way your current browser works and you use it for your regular browsing as well. With the following tools, Switching to using Polypane becomes a little easier.

Browser extensions

To help make the switch to Polypane a little easier, there are a number of tools you can use. First and foremost, Polypane has browser extensions available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. These addons add the Polypane logo to the top of the browser and to the right-click menu of links. When you find yourself going from browsing to developing, either click the Polypane logo in the header to open the current page in Polypane, or right click any link to open that page in Polypane. You can get the extensions from the Download page.

Browsersync

If you use Browsersync, you might have configured it to open your browser using the browser options. You can replace your current browser with "polypane", or add it to the list. Whenever you start your development server, Polypane will be automatically opened with your site. To configure Browsersync to work nicely with Polypane, read the instructions at other tools.

Browser managers

For both Mac and Windows there are browser managers available. You configure these as your default browser. They route the urls you open to different browsers, either manually or by defining rules. You can configure this to always open localhost in Polypane, for example. The following two browser managers have excellent support for Polypane:

For macOS: Browserosaurus

Browserosaurus is an open source application developed by Will Stone. You can open links in Polypane using the 'p' hotkey.

For Windows: Account surfer

Account surfer is available via the Microsoft Store and is developed by Marat Dospolov. Hotkeys are dependant on the position.