Switchboard Browser Picker for Mac

Open every link in the right browser, Chrome or Brave profile, or private window. Switchboard is a free, open-source macOS menu-bar app that you set as your default browser. When you click a link in Slack, Mail, Notes or any other app, it either follows your rules or shows a quick browser picker at your cursor.

Use it to:

• open work links in your work Chrome profile and everything else in your personal one
• choose which browser opens a link each time you click it
• send Google Meet, Zoom or GitHub links to the browser you keep for them
• open links from a specific app (like Slack) in a specific browser or profile
• open some sites in a private or incognito window by default
• strip tracking junk like utm_source and fbclid, and skip Outlook SafeLinks and other redirect wrappers

Download Switchboard · Website · Compare Mac browser pickers

switchboard-demo.mp4

Features

• Picker at the cursor. Links without a rule open a small panel next to your mouse. Press 1–9 or click a row.
• One row per profile. Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera and Chromium profiles each get their own row.
• Rules. Send links to a browser by site, by URL pattern, or by the app you clicked them in.
• Remember with ⌘. Hold ⌘ while picking a browser to always open that site there.
• Private windows. Hold ⌥ while picking, or set a rule to always open privately (Chromium and Firefox families).
• Link cleanup. Removes tracking parameters (utm_*, fbclid, gclid, msclkid and more) and unwraps Outlook SafeLinks, Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slack and YouTube redirect links before your rules run. On by default.
• No account and no network access. Your settings stay in one local JSON file. Link cleanup happens on your Mac and never looks anything up online.

Install

Option 1: Download the app

1. Download Switchboard.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open it and drag Switchboard into Applications.
3. Open Switchboard. If macOS asks whether to open an app downloaded from the internet, click Open.
4. Settings opens on first launch. Click Make Default and confirm the macOS prompt.

Option 2: Homebrew

Homebrew builds Switchboard from source on your Mac.

brew install justadityaraj/tap/switchboard
ln -sf "$(brew --prefix)/opt/switchboard/Switchboard.app" /Applications/Switchboard.app

Update later with brew upgrade switchboard.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. The download runs on Apple Silicon and Intel.

Settings

Open Settings from the menu-bar icon (Settings…, ⌘,), or open the app again from Finder.

• Clean links: turn link cleanup on or off.
• Links without a rule: ask every time, or always use one browser or profile.
• Rules: add, edit, reorder and delete rules. Rules are checked top to bottom, and the first match wins.
• Show in picker: hide apps that registered for web links but aren't browsers.

Each rule matches on any mix of sites, source apps and a URL pattern. A rule matches only when all of its conditions match.

Picker shortcuts

Key	Action
1–9	Open in that row
Return	Open in the first row
⌘ + choice	Open there and always use it for this site
⌥ + choice	Open in a private window
⌘C	Copy the link
Esc / click away	Cancel

Hold Shift when you click a link to see the picker, even when a rule matches.

Config file

Settings saves everything to ~/Library/Application Support/Switchboard/config.json. Switchboard reads the file on every link, so hand edits apply at once.

{
  "cleanLinks": true,
  "defaultTarget": null,
  "hiddenBrowsers": ["com.example.NotABrowser"],
  "rules": [
    { "hosts": ["work.example.com"], "open": { "browser": "com.google.Chrome", "profile": "Profile 1" } },
    { "urlPattern": "github\\.com/acme-", "open": { "browser": "com.google.Chrome", "profile": "Profile 2" } },
    { "hosts": ["zoom.us"], "sourceApps": ["com.apple.mail"], "open": { "browser": "com.apple.Safari" } },
    { "hosts": ["bank.example"], "open": { "browser": "com.brave.Browser", "private": true } }
  ]
}

• hosts matches the domain and all its subdomains. example.com also matches www.example.com.
• urlPattern is a case-insensitive regular expression, tested against the full URL.
• sourceApps lists the bundle IDs of the apps the link may come from.
• profile is the Chromium profile directory (Default, Profile 1, …), not its display name.
• defaultTarget opens unmatched links without the picker. Leave it null to always ask.
• cleanLinks removes tracking parameters and unwraps redirect links before rules match. Defaults to true.

To find an app's bundle ID, run osascript -e 'id of app "Google Chrome"'.

Build from source

You need Xcode 16 or later (Swift 6).

git clone https://github.com/justadityaraj/switchboard-browser-picker.git
cd switchboard-browser-picker
./scripts/build.sh --install

build.sh runs the self-check and builds a universal release binary. It packages the app as build/Switchboard.app. --install copies it to /Applications, and --release also writes build/Switchboard.dmg and build/Switchboard.zip.

Path	Contents
Sources/SwitchboardCore	Rule matching, config parsing, profile discovery and launch flags. No AppKit.
Sources/Switchboard	The app: menu-bar item, URL handling, picker and Settings.
Sources/SwitchboardSelfCheck	Checks for the core logic. Run with swift run SwitchboardSelfCheck.

Signing

Releases from 0.2.1 on are signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so they open without a security warning. The certificate belongs to the Apple Developer account of Swagloop Ventures Private Limited, a company I'm a director of. It's the developer account I already have, and it saves you the Open Anyway step.

Switchboard is still my personal project. Swagloop doesn't own it, fund it or receive any data from it, and the MIT license covers all of it. If a future release is signed under a different account, nothing changes in how you install or use it. Homebrew builds aren't affected either way, because they're built on your own Mac.

License

MIT