Clever Polypane Debugging Features I’m Loving

I’m working on an update to what I call my personal website HD remaster. Well, I wouldn’t call it a “complete” redesign. I’m just cleaning up and Polypane comes into the clutch. I’ve written about how much I enjoy developing with Polypane on my personal blog Back in March 2023. In it I say that every time I open the browser I discover new things, and I’m here to say it still happens As of August 2024.

Polypane, if you’re not familiar with it, is a web browser specifically designed to help developers in a variety of ways. The most obvious feature is the multiple panels that display your project in different viewport sizes:

I won’t try to list all the features available in Polypane. I leave that to the friend and creator, Kilian Valkhof. Instead, I want to talk about a neat feature I recently discovered.

Outline tab.

In Polypane’s sidebar you will find different tabs that provide various information about your website. For example, if you’re wondering what your social media previews will look like for your latest blog post, Polypane is for you Meta Tab.

The tab I want to focus on is the outline Tab. On the surface, it seems pretty simple: Polypane scans the page and provides you with outlines for headings, landmarks, links, images, focus order, and even the page’s entire accessibility tree.

Viewing your page this way can help you spot some pretty obvious errors, but Polypane doesn’t stop there. Verification of the Show problems Option will highlight some of the not so obvious problems.

You can do this in the “Sights” view Show potential also, showing elements that could potentially be page markers.

These outline views also allow you to show an overlay on the page and highlight where things are.

The reason I came across these features in the Outline tab in the first place is because of a bug I tracked down that is specifically related to focus order. So I switched to the “Focus Order” outline to examine things in more detail.

Then I noticed the option to display an overlay for the focus order.

This provides a literal map of your page’s focus order. I found this to be incredibly useful in troubleshooting the error and a great way to visualize how someone might navigate your website using a keyboard.

Such seemingly small but useful features abound in Polypane.

Amazing tool

When I turned to Kilian and told him about my discovery, his response was: “Everything is there when you need it!”

I can vouch for that.