I’ve talked about how using separate browsers for personal and professional tasks can help you to become more productive. As you receive links from your clients and colleagues, you’ll find that choosing where the links should go becomes a hindrance. Let’s address that problem with this utility.
Choosy is a versatile preference pane utility that lets you choose the default browser for every link you click on Mac. This is a utility you must have if you’ve used a separate browser for each workspace where every link has its own dedicated browser.
Choosy prompts you with a selection of available or running browsers for every clicked link. You’ll notice that the browsers are laid out in a circular position from the location of the link which provides a quick way to select available browsers.
You don’t have to choose which browser you want to use every time you click on a link. You can tell Choosy to always open the link in your favorite browser under behavior setting. Instead of the hindering “choose your browser” prompt, you’re going to use the Advanced feature that lets you configure rules that decide the default browser for every link based on the source of application or the web address.
The rules above tells Choosy to open every web address that contains company name in Google Chrome.1 Usually, every website you visit will include a particular string that represents the company. For example, if you use Slack, the site will be yourcompany.slack.com. You can also include other web addresses that don’t contain the company name, but still related to your professional works, in this rules.
The second rule I recommend is to open links according to the source of the application. While the first rule can handle most of the links you receive from any applications, sometimes you want to open the link you from an application in a particular browser. For instance, since I use Slack for collaboration, I want to open every incoming link in Google Chrome. Regardless of the web addresses, I want to keep them in Google Chrome browsing history.
I wrote a detailed guide about nested rules which you can use to create complex rules to handle web address. ↩