I’m using multiple browsers: Firefox for regular web browsing, and Chrome for work. Additionally, I’m utilizing multiple Chrome profiles, one for every client I work with, to have a dedicated browser space with separate extensions and sessions. This setup works… as long as I’m within a web browser. When I’m in a terminal, or in Slack, or any other non-browser context, all these assumptions about particular browser or profiles being used for specific sites no longer apply. The operating system doesn’t know about them, and the only way to control what browser is going to handle the URL I just clicked, is to set the default browser in the system settings. That’s not enough.
Initially, I went ahead and made sure each application that allowed it was set with its dedicated web browser. Unfortunately, after a while I figured it’s not enough. There were applications that either didn’t support overriding the default web browser, or I’ve already used them in multiple contexts which made overriding a default web browser useless. I knew the process of determining the correct browser to handle the URL has to apply some basic logic and it’s not doable with the system or application settings. That’s how I got the idea of a middleman.
When you click a URL, every modern OS will parse it and look up the configured handler based on the schema. For HTTP & HTTPS URLs, it’s going to look for the default web browser. I decided to use this setup to my advantage, and replace the default web browser with a small utility that’s only responsibility is to launch the correct browser with the URL it got as an input. The logic behind it was based on the URL being matched against a list of regexp patterns - the first match determined the correct browser. I’ve put the configuration in a JSON file, tweaked it a few times over the next weeks and forgot about it completely afterwards. It’s been working flawlessly ever since.
If you’re interested, check out the browser-matcher repository on GitHub. It’s just a small Go application that you might find useful if you’re using multiple browser, or browser profiles like I do.