If you’re a web developer, especially a front-end developer, and you are not using the Sizzy browser, you have no idea what you’re missing and you need to stop right now and download their trial.
Seriously.
Let me start off by saying that Sizzy is a PREMIUM product – you have to pay for it. And compared to free browsers, it’s not cheap. $15 per month, $144 per year on an annual subscription or $499 for a lifetime license.
BUT, once you start using it as a web developer I doubt you’ll go back to using anything else.
So, what makes Sizzy so much better than other browsers? Here are a few of the features that make it the go-to browser when I’m doing cross-device development:
Projects
A project in Sizzy is one or more tabs. When you switch a project, all your tabs change – in the same window. This is especially useful on a laptop where you have a single screen but working on multiple projects and can’t spread out your browser windows among multiple monitors.
Custom Sessions
This has to be, by far, my favorite feature. Think of this as private browser windows on steroids.
You can create labels for sessions and then open tabs that are restricted to that session.
For example, you can have multiple GMAIL accounts open in different tabs that do not step on each other. Instead of switching back and forth using GMAIL’s account switcher, you can just have different accounts open in different tabs with different cookies, temp files etc.
Combined with Projects, you basically have the equivalent of browser project sandboxes that work much better than private windows/tabs.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where a private browser window doesn’t quite work and you end up having to open a different tab just to log in to an account as different user, you’ll love Sizzy custom sessions.
And, if you’re focused on personal privacy, judicious use of custom sessions will reduce the amount of cross-site tracking that gets applied to your person.
Device Preview
You can preview the same website in multiple devices simultaneously. Just enter the website address in the address bar for the tab and all configured devices will display the site. Here’s an example:
It gets better – scroll one device and the other devices scroll in sync.
Click on a link in one device and the other devices automatically sync to the same click!
You can even configure it so that filling out a form in one device shows up in all the other device previews!
Screen Shots
Taking screen shots of sites inside of different devices is a pain with mainstream browsers. But Sizzy has made this task stupidly simple. It can generate a screen shot of ALL configured devices in a tab with just a couple of clicks!
Deep Developer Experiences
The browser is heavily focused on the developer. It has its own unique console, a better cookies editor, custom debugging panels, local storage editor and so much more. Here’s a list of some of the developer focused features:
- Custom cookies editor
- Custom debugging panels
- Local storage editor
- Network simulation
- Presets (tons of presets so you don’t have to reconfigure things every time)
- Print stylesheets (visualize how a printed page will look)
- Record videos
- Reference browser
- Software keyboard simulation
- Sync forms
- Touch cursor
- Focus modes
- Console.log for CSS
- “Butler” workflows – this is basically a souped-up command palette.
It would make this article ridiculously long if we tried to review each of the features listed above. Instead, I suggest that you jump over to the Sizzy features page – there are videos and screen shots on there that explore and demo each feature.
Feature Images
Here are a couple of screen shots taken directly from the Sizzy website for the Cookie Editor and the Custom Console.
That should give you some idea of the tweaks that Sizzy adds to their version of a standard browser.
Niggling Issues
About the only thing I’ve found frustrating about Sizzy is that I can’t seem to open more than one instance of it.
And, it can also be a little slow sometimes – the more devices you load into a tab, the slower operations are going to be in that tab. I guess that’s to be expected. I hope they eventually spend some time to optimize that part of the experience though.
Wrapup
This is just a taste of what Sizzy brings to the table. You have to spend a week or two immersing yourself in it to really appreciate what it can do for you. The entire thing is based on the Chromium project; so under the hood it’s basically using what 80%+ of developers are using every day.
Do you already use Sizzy or have you used it in the past? If so, drop us your comments in the form below and we’ll use them to update this article at a later date.
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