MacOS – How to always open certain URLs/domains in certain browsers

browsermacos

My main browser is Firefox, so I want most URLs to open there when I've clicked on them from Thunderbird. But I want to look at Google+ in Chrome, where it's faster; likewise a few other JavaScript-heavy sites.

Is there some way to hijack the Mac's "default browser" launcher so that it will parse the URL and route the request to my favorite browser for that URL? I can think of three ways this might happen:

Create a Mac app that acts as the default browser that does nothing but go launch another browser, depending on the URL;
Set Firefox as my default browser, and use some extension (like the discontinued Safari View or Open In Safari, or the windows-only Chrome View or IE View) to redirect specific URLs to Chrome;
- Set Chrome as my default browser, and use some equivalent extension to redirect specific URLs (including a wildcard URL) to Firefox.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Choosy does exactly this (among other things).

Forget the default browser, Choosy opens links in the right browser. When you click on a link Choosy will do the right thing, whether that's something simple (like using whatever browser is already running) or something complex (like prompting you to pick a browser, but only when you hold down the shift key and click on a link to google.com).

Related Solutions

Firefox – Always open specific domains in a different browser from Firefox

I use an addon called IE view that does this. It allows you to use any browser you want, and only uses IE if you don't tell it to use something else.

As you can see I have told it to use Chrome IE view options screen

Linux – way to redirect certain URLs to specific web browsers in Linux

The executable in Linux that opens a resource with your "favorite" program is called xdg-open. It is somewhat complicated, but you can add additional rules using xdg-mime install. However, I don't know if you can even do this for something like a specific URL.

This becomes further complicated in that specific desktop environments use different executables and methods for opening their default programs. For instance KDE has kde-open, but not every KDE application seems to use this.

Regardless, I got this partially working just using a shell script and a list of domains/URLs in a file. You can tweak it to your liking.

Note: You may need to repeat this process for other executables depending on your desktop environment. For example, Gnome has gvfs-open, KDE has kde-open, and XFCE has exo-open. (Even then, it might not work for every application.)

Note: The shell script is dependent on pcregrep being installed on your system.

Find the xdg-open executable
```
which xdg-open
```
Create a new directory in your home folder
```
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
```
Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file

~/.bashrc
```
export PATH="${HOME}/.local/bin:${PATH}"
```

Create the shell script in the newly created folder. (Be sure to edit the top four variables so they are correct for your system!)

~/.local/bin/xdg-open

#!/bin/bash

DOMAIN_LIST_FILE=~/'domains.txt'
OTHER_BROWSER='/path/to/other-browser' # For instance /usr/bin/firefox
BROWSER_OPTIONS='' # Optional, for command line options passed to browser
XDG_OPEN='/path/to/xdg-open'

if echo "$1" | pcregrep -q '^https?://'; then
    matching=0
    while read domain; do
        if echo "$1" | pcregrep -q "^https?://${domain}"; then
            matching=1
            break
        fi
    done < "$DOMAIN_LIST_FILE"

    if [[ $matching -eq 1 ]]; then
        "$OTHER_BROWSER" $BROWSER_OPTIONS ${*}
        exit 0
    fi
fi

"$XDG_OPEN" ${*}

Create the list of domains in your home folder

~/domains.txt
```
stackexchange.com
stackoverflow.com
superuser.com
```
Log out and log back in to have the settings take effect

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Firefox – Always open specific domains in a different browser from Firefox

Linux – way to redirect certain URLs to specific web browsers in Linux

Related Question