Choosy Chooses The Best Browser
1:53 am, October 21st, 2008, Giles Turnbull
This is one of those ideas that hits you like a bucket of wallpaper paste, and you think “Why on earth did no-one think of that before?”
Choosy is a utility for anyone who uses multiple browsers and wants to open certain links in certain browsers under certain circumstances. Web developers will know what I mean, but there’s something in this for normal people, too.
For example, if you’ve created any stand-alone webapps using Fluid, you might want to open some links in one or more of those apps. Say you’ve got a Fluid app for your Google Docs. When an email arrives with a link to a shared document, Choosy will let you open it in the right Fluid-created app, not in your default browser.
I suspect developer George Brocklehurst might be a name to keep an eye on in future. What’s the next smart idea up his sleeve? Watch out for more bucket-of-wallpaper-paste moments.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Software | Comment on this article
This seems like way too much to me. Being both a web developer/engineer and someone who uses Fluid as well (BaseCamp, CMS, Blogs, etc.,.) — there is simply a setting in Fluid that will allow the user to browse to any URL…
If you open up any application you have created in Fluid, then navigate to Preferances > Advanced, you’ll see an option for “Allow browsing to any URL” — this way you can use the “web app” as a real application without it having to load in the background or all together in another browser. Makes more sense to me than what you’ve explained here.
But thank you, as always
Aviv, on October 21st, 2008 at 7:44 am
This is awesome! I have been waiting for something like this to get made. I constantly have a ton of windows open in Safari, and sometimes I just need to use a different browser to open a quick link, or dump a youtube link elsewhere so I don’t risk a crash because I have lots of windows open. I love it!
Ian, on October 21st, 2008 at 12:22 pm
The advantage of this is not AT ALL what you implied, Aviv – it is for links clicked on OUTSIDE of a Fluid app, so that they open in the Fluid app instead of in the default browser.
The whole point of a Fluid app is NOT to use it as a browser, but to use it as a SSB (single site browser). Choosy seems to allow you to direct the OS to confine all *.example.com links to that Fluid app, while still leaving Firefox or Safari as your default browser.
Jordan, on October 21st, 2008 at 12:46 pm