Specific browser for specific links
Does any one know how to open a specific browser for specific links?
I have two links that I want to open in IE and others in Chrome. Is this even possible?
Solution 1:
A Solution would be a seperate "browser handler" program. It would be set in Windows as the default browser, but wouldn't open any link itself at all and instead present you with a list of browsers and relay the URL to the one you select. Basically same as on android, if you hadn't ticked the "Always use …" option for a specific file type.
Solution 2:
Answer / Explanation / Technical:
No, there is no practical way to do that. Windows has a list of “handlers” which tell it what to do (eg what program to run) when different types of files and system objects are activated (eg opened). The list is limited to types which for the most part just includes extensions (eg .EXE, .DOC, .URL, etc.) There is no way to specify handlers for specific filenames since the list would eventually grow ridiculously large and provide extremely poor performance. Worse, there is definitely no way to specify handlers based on the contents of a file since that would require Windows to (1) open the file, and (2) know how to read and interpret the contents.
Bookmarks (ie, “browser links”) are plain-text files with a .URL extension which contain the URL. For example:
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://www.org/blah.html
For what you want, Windows would need to know how to open the file, read and parse it, analyze the URL and make a decision based on that. There is just no way for that to happen.
Theoretically there could be a way to practically implement file-name/contents-specific handlers. Preview handlers allow Windows to read a file and provide information about it (eg video length and thumbnail, audio bitrate, # words in a DOC file, etc.), so the framework is there, but currently, there is just no way to perform content-specific actions.
Possible Solution:
If there really are only two links (ie you do not create new bookmarks often), then the closest you can come to doing a URL-specific handler would be to create your own file-type (eg .URLc) by copying the default URL file-type and changing the program (browser) that is used to open it.
Better Solution 1:
If your issue is that certain sites require IE (eg Windows Update), then a much easier option would be to install an extension like IE Tab. The better ones even let you configure it to automatically use an IE-based tab for specified URLs.
Better Solution 2:
Another option as suggested by Psycogeek is to create a normal desktop shortcut to pass the URL to IE instead of using an actual Internet shortcut (aka bookmark):
- Right click a blank area on the desktop (or folder) and select
New->New Shortcut - For the location, you would simply enter a URL to create a bookmark (a plain-text
.URLfile, but that is not what you want, instead prefix the URL withiexplore. For example:iexplore http://www.org/
Now instead of a bookmark file, it creates a Windows shortcut (a binary .LNK file). When you want to run that specific site, it will run the specified program with the specified arguments (in this case IE with the target URL). It can be launched in the same way as a bookmark.
Like the possible solution presented above, it makes the assumption that there are few items that require special treatment since it means a little more work to create and maintain them. Note that because these are Windows shortcuts instead of bookmarks, they will not be treated as expected in certain scenarios that work with bookmarks such as backups, duplicate detection, bookmark managers, etc. However, if there are just a small handful of special-case URLs, then it should not be too much of a problem to work-around it.
Solution 3:
I created a shortcut on my desktop:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" http://example.com
Add a space between .exe" and http:
When you click on it, you will go to example.com using Chrome.
I resized the IE window and dragged and dropped the shorcut to the links bar in IE.
Solution 4:
For my windows computer, if the link needs to open in Chrome, I just add the prefix "chromerun://" before the "http://" in the webaddress when I'm saving the shortcut or creating the hyperlink for others to use. This will cause the page to open in chrome automatically, regardless of the default browser setting. I've included an example below.
Using a shortcut or clicking on a hyperlink with this path in a word document or email will open google using Chrome every time. I am not an IT person and don't know exactly why this works or if there is an iE equivalent of this trick, but I've been doing this for years and it works well for me.
Solution 5:
As suggested by ahz in a comment to another answer, you can install Browser Selector by Danny Tuppeny (DanTup).
It's a manual process to set it up, but it's relatively easy to do. And you have the full source code to check what it does. I just installed it, it took a few minutes to set up, and it works perfectly.
It works by registering as a web browser in Windows (you run BrowserSelector.exe --register), and then you select it as the default browser using PC Settings > Apps > Default apps > Web browser (can be opened with Windows+R, typing ms-settings:defaultapps, Enter).
It won't handle internal links within a browser of course, but links clicked in Windows programs open in the browser (or browser profile) you specify in an INI file.
I personally set it to open Facebook links in a separate Chrome profile that I only use for Facebook. Other links open in the latest used Chrome profile, as normal. This is the INI file I use to do that ("Profile 7" is the name of my Chrome profile for Facebook):
[browsers]
chrome = C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
chrome_facebook = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome_proxy.exe" --profile-directory="Profile 7"
firefox = C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
ie = iexplore.exe
edge = microsoft-edge:{url}
; Url preferences.
; Only * is treated as a special character (wildcard).
; Matches are domain-only. Protocols and paths are ignored.
; Use "*.blah.com" for subdomains, not "*blah.com" as that
; would also match "abcblah.com".
[urls]
facebook.com = chrome_facebook
*.facebook.com = chrome_facebook
You can even use regular expressions to match the URLs (including paths) if you enclose them in /.../.
The program only takes up 50 KB of disk space.