-1 for BrowserChooser

[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.

[Jimdoria]

Hi Mouser!

I definitely didn't go spelunking into the registry until after I'd tried the more "conventional" fix of using Set Program Access & Defaults to reset the default browser.

If that by itself had fixed things, I probably wouldn't have posted here.

Even after editing all the registry entries, web links from within Outlook still weren't working. I had to go into IE and choose Internet Options, then on the Security tab click "Reset all zones to default level." That finally fixed the last BrowserChooser issue - at least as far as I can tell.

[Lebewesen]

PickBrowser is great - esp. when you use a lot of diffrent browsers like me.

[MilesAhead]

If you use this kind of functionality very frequently something like Pick Browser may be the way to go.  I was looking for a way to come up with my own "default browser intercept" mechanism.  I didn't like the Registry mess involved so I took a different approach.

It's not strictly for browsers but a launcher that passes selected text to an application during launch.  You can add browsers just by dragging the shortcut to the Popup Window.

Say for example you an in Chromium but you see that page would work better in Firefox.  Highlight the address and hit the hotkey.  Double click Firefox in the listbox.  Firefox opens to the page.

Or if you are using a text editor that does not have link launch feature the way EditPad does.  Select the url text in the editor. Hit the hotkey, select the browser from the list.

You can add any shortcut, not just browsers.

Here's a screen shot:



It's also an alternative to SendTo since you can select a file in Explorer and hit the hotkey to pass that filename to any program in the list.

Edit: another cool thing you can do with it(that I often forget to use myself and just remembered) is select 2 folders in Explorer, hit the hotkey, launch FreeCommander or another file manager that accepts folders on the command line, it will open with a folder in each pane.

Edit2: afa using with FreeCommander it's ok if neither folder has a space in the path. It's really designed to pass one command line arg.  Has a go with "" to double quote the arg in case of spaces.  To pick off folders from Explorer to use with FreeCommander or Q-Dir HalfShell is better. It passes up to 4 folders to an alternate file manager, wrapping those with spaces with double quotes. Once set up all you need to do is hit Shift-Enter hotkey.

Selector is better for picking stuff out of text or a browser's address bar as noted earlier.

[Jimdoria]

Thanks, Miles! Nice tip.

One week later and web links from Outlook still take some fiddling before they'll open properly.
Install in haste, repent at leisure. 

[MilesAhead]

Thanks, Miles! Nice tip.

One week later and web links from Outlook still take some fiddling before they'll open properly.
Install in haste, repent at leisure. 

Heh heh. Speaking of install, it's weird how things go around.  I found a nice free skin thingie for Inno Setup to dress up the install dialog.  Just when I get a few of them made, now everything has to be "portable" to be cool.