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-1 for BrowserChooser

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Jimdoria:
Saw this great post over at FreewareGenius called Another Forty-Three of the Best Free Windows Enhancements

It's part two of a series, and looking though it I saw a lot of interesting stuff, but the only tweak that really seemed like something I needed was BrowserChooser. This is an app that intercepts any link to the browser on your system and lets you choose which browser to open it in - IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc.

It set up easy, but didn't really work all that well on my system.

But the real issue was that when I uninstalled it, it didn't even come close to putting things back the way they were - browser links, HTML files, web shortcuts, web links from inside of Outlook - all broken.

I just spent half an hour going through the registry and hacking out the entries it left behind and restoring the affected values to the original settings. Not even sure yet I'm back to 100%.

But I thought I'd post a note for anyone considering using this app - watch out, you may get more (or less) than you bargained for.

Renegade:
Thanks for the heads-up.

mouser:
It's a huge pain to set the default browser..  and because different browsers use different registry settings that have partial overlaps, it's hard to be completely consistent when switching between browsers.

Browsers tend to be pretty good at restoring themselves as the default handler and fixing up links, so one solution if you ever find your links not opening right after experimenting with such a tool is to run the different browsers and tell them to re-establish themselves as the default browsers.  That will usually fix problems.

One of the major changes I made to my browser switcher tool (BrowserTraySwitch) was to have it snapshot the relevant registry keys and then just switch between the saved registry key sets as requested.

BrowserChooser seems like a nice program -- i've always considered adding the features it provides to BrowserTraySwitch but it didn't seem like their was much point given the existence of BrowserChooser..

hpearce:
I use a program called PickBrowser which seems to work ok http://www.xintercept.com/pb/pb.html

It woprks basically by makingitself the default browser triggering it to execute at which point u can choose among available browsers u have configured.

mouser:
Nice find, I've never heard of PickBrowser.

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