Filed under: Software, Cool tools
Choosy, your new default browser
It plays out like a Harlequin Romance for many a Mac user (especially web designers and developers): you have a fairly solid relationship with Safari, on a day-to-day basis. Despite your admiration for Safari's beauty and speed, though, the siren song of Firefox frequently seduces you away for extended romps, tempting you with a bounty of desirable extensions and themes. Personally, I've just decided to make my relationship polygamous, Safari for browsing, Firefox for web development.
The rub, though, is in the definition of the system's default browser; for me, there's no winning that war. I'm constantly launching browsers unintentionally, wishing my Mac would just figure out which application I want to handle a link with at any given time. George Brocklehurst has a solution, though, and I'm loving it.
Choosy is a Preference Pane (and accompanying helper application) which takes the place of the default browser. When you click a link anywhere outside of a web browser, it takes action based on your preferences: you can have it open the link in whatever browser is running (defaulting to your favorite browser if nothing is open), or you can have it always display a choice of browsers, among other configuration options. I set mine up to display the menu of browser icons every time, thereby ending the unintentional application-launching which stems from my need for multiple browsers.
Choosy is in beta, and it's got some issues. The biggest for me is its inability to handle multiple displays. That, along with every other question I had about its future development, is already laid out in the development roadmap. Choosy will be a paid application once it's out of beta, but beta testers who provide George with an email address will be getting a code for a beta tester discount. If your own browser infidelity is causing problems for you, give Choosy a try.
Fair warning, by the way: If you install Minefield, you'll lose Firefox from your Choosy browser list until you uninstall it. The ability to customize the browser list is on the roadmap (and there is a workaround -- editing the CFBundleIdentifier in Firefox's Info.plist to a unique value -- but that's not for the fainthearted), so hopefully that will soon be a non-issue.
Thanks Laurie
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Matthew Hillyer said 10:49AM on 10-28-2008
I think choosy broke my ability to launch url's from TweetDeck. Other than that I rather like it.
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Steven Finch said 12:37PM on 10-28-2008
We have just added a new post on Crenk, which aims to try to find out why people use a certain browser. http://crenk.com/which-web-browser-do-you-use-and-why/
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who? said 12:43PM on 10-28-2008
You guys know that Firefox has been faster than Safari for months now, right? Just test it for yourselves- try loading TUAW. Safari only loads roughly 1/2 of the page when Firefox has the whole thing!!
(admittedly, they both continue to load ads and stuff for quite a while, but it's the main content loading time that matters to most people)
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mark said 12:45PM on 10-28-2008
I think Choosy is fundamentally flawed, because it only works "When you click a link anywhere outside of a web browser...."
Aside from clicking links in an email, how often is that the case? When I click a link in an email, 99.9% of the time, I want it to use my default browser. There needs to be another, more "universal" way to invoke Choosy -- say a contextual menu; you control-click the link, and then Choosy appears.
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David said 1:35PM on 10-28-2008
#mark
That is not entirely true because Choosy becomes your default browser and therefore it is also pretty great in say NetNewsWire, cause when you control-click a link you can those "Open Link In Default Browser" and this is now Choosy, which I find pretty useful!
But when that's said I think there is a lot of room for development for this thing, but for now I think it's pretty nifty!
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Nathan said 3:00PM on 10-28-2008
I haven't used Safari in a while. I actually find it to get quite bloated very quickly. The way I work, I keep my browser open for long periods of time keeping tabs open that I want to go back to later. I don't bookmark a lot, or I'll forget to go back to that page, if it's on my tab bar, I see it there so I remember to check it out before I close the tab.
In this kind of usage, Safari will have memory usage of 1.0 GB or more in just a few days. I have had Shiretoko (Firefox Beta) running with at least 5-6 tabs open at all times, currently with 15 tabs open in 3 windows, and I haven't restarted the app in at least 45 days (should really restart to install that 10.5.5 update...) Guess what, my real memory usage right now is 281.49 MB.
I like the look of Safari, and the integration such as the form auto fill (I type in "Na" for first name, hit tab, and all the other text boxes fill in, last name, phone number, address, etc), but it just gets so bloated in such short time.
Well, I guess I should finally restart for that 10.5.5 update, I kinda wanted to see just how long Shiretoko would run without crashing. Oh well, I guess now I can install Minefield and see how fast that will run.
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