Improve Fluid SSB’s with Choosy

In case you haven’t tried it, Fluid is a very cool application for creating Single Site Browsers (SSB’s). If you use a web application, such as Gmail, on a routine basis you should try creating an SSB. Beside freeing up a browser tab, you get a dock icon, badges, and even growl notifications for some apps. You can customize the behavior and appearance of the SSB in lots of ways. But to get the most out of SSBs (and web browsers in general) I recommend Choosy.

NOTE: Fluid is Mac only. Windows users check out Prism or Chrome app shortcuts

If you aren’t already using SSBs see this for an overview. One of the features that makes an SSB unique is the ability to restrict it to certain URLs. Any URL that doesn’t match the allowed pattern will be sent to your default browser. This is one of the ways Fluid acts more like a self-contained desktop application. But the reverse of this behavior, where certain links are always sent to the corresponding SSB, is (understandably) lacking and this detracts a bit from the usability.

To give an example, let’s say you create an SSB for Basecamp. It works great. But now let’s say you are reading a Basecamp notification in your email client. If you click the link, it will open the URL in your default browser. But this isn’t what you want because you’re using your Basecamp SSB for those pages! You could just drag the URL to your Basecamp SSB’s dock icon, but that is not ideal. What you really need is a way of always opening Basecamp URLs with the correct SSB. This is where Choosy, and specifically Choosy Fluid, come in to play.

Choosy allows you to set up rules about preferred browsers:

Forget the default browser, Choosy opens links in the right browser. When you click on a link Choosy will do the right thing, whether that’s something simple (like using whatever browser is already running) or something complex (like prompting you to pick a browser, but only when you hold down the shift key and click on a link to google.com).

And ChoosyFluid automatically creates the advanced Choosy rules for you based off of your Fluid SSB’s.

By installing these applications you’ll be able to route certain types of links to the preferred browser or preferred SSB automatically. Some of my favorite uses are for Basecamp and Google Docs. Click one of these links in your email client and it is automatically opened in the correct SSB.