Is it possible to specify which browser should be used to open a link to a web page on a per-link basis?
Use case: I am permanently signed in to my Goole account in Chrome, because I do all my Google Drive stuff in Chrome. I choose NOT to sign in to Google in Safari. Whenever I open a link to a Google Doc, I want to use Chrome, thereby bypassing the login step. At present, Hook opens the link in Safari, which forces me to login to Google in Safari, which I don’t want to do.
It would be great if I could specify which browser I want to use for each Hook link. Perhaps the browser from which the link was created should be the browser to open the link?
Any hints or suggestions would be appreciated. Or, consider this a feature request if browser-specific links to websites are not possible at present.
Don’t know if this is possible with Hook natively, but I recently discovered this app called Choosy, and it is awesome. Literally all it does is let you be very specific with browser defaults. Best $10 ever spent!
Second vote for Choosy. I’ve been using it for years, and the Advanced options that it has it way better than anything else I’ve seen in other browsers that offer similar features.
I haven’t tried Choosy. Looking at the product description, it seems to solve the OP issue…
Given that you can paste URLs anywhere (i.e, not only in Hook) it seems to make sense to go for something like Choosy. After you’ve pasted a URL outside of Hook, unless it is a hook:// URL, Hook is not in the loop.
I’d still like Hook to be able to generate a hook link from a browser.
It’s capable of doing a better job than Choosy. Choosy can’t link within files.
Browsers are increasingly replacing operating systems like OSX. Although the often broken and closed nature of the web is an annoyance, it’s a fight we have to fight.
I encounter this too. Safari’s new features interfere with WordPress editing so I now do that in Edge. I do all my forum work in Brave. I have a bunch of specific Firefox profiles for a bunch of different purposes.
The difficulty we face is having many feature requests, so every feature has an opportunity cost and we always proceed carefully to avoid introducing bugs. So it’s always a delicate balancing act. And there’s the complexity of the UI to minimize. This one in particular has implications: it would need a UI to change the default web browser used for the specific URL.
Internally, we have often discussed this more generally with respect to files. Hook takes the simple approach that is easy to explain: Hook delegates the opening of files to macOS; when you open a hook://file/ URL, the same app is used that would be used if you were to double-click on the file in Finder. Sometimes it would be useful to open the hooked file with a specific app. But that too adds to complexity and also the complexity of undoing configurations. What if later you want to change the mapping when you have many hooks pointing to the same thing, and many hooks in the system? We would need to add a lot of logic to enable users to do that right. So it’s tricky.
Many thanks. Finicky in that link is free and combines well with the Browserosaurus browser selector.
This is a great first step but I think Hook needs to get further into the browser. Perhaps there’s some extensions in the browsers to improve linkability for Hook? I can see how it’s kind of a separate project.
I’d like to direct anyone reading this to my thread on putting Hook links on websites you can edit in some way: