What’s new in BrowserFairy

Rules see the real destination

Links from Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google search results often arrive wrapped in a redirect address. Outlook's Safe Links turns a GitHub link into a long safelinks.protection.outlook.com address, Slack routes links through slack-redir.net, and Google adds a google.com/url hop. Your rules only ever saw the wrapper, so a rule that begins with https://github.com/ or points at a specific page never matched, and the link went to the fallback browser.

BrowserFairy now reads the real destination out of these wrappers before checking your rules, and opens that destination directly. No lookup is needed, so routing stays as instant as before. See How routing works.

A small request for a rating

Once BrowserFairy has been routing your links for a while, it may ask you once to rate it on the Mac App Store. It will not ask again for months. Ratings help other people find BrowserFairy, so thank you if you take a moment.

A guided setup

New to BrowserFairy? Setup is now a short guided tour: make BrowserFairy your default browser, create your first rule, and pick a fallback browser for links that don't match a rule.

Browser profile access on macOS 27

If macOS blocks BrowserFairy from reading a browser's profiles, your other browsers keep routing as usual. Settings shows you how to grant access so you can get the affected profiles working again.

Profiles where you expect them

Browser profiles in the rules editor are now listed alphabetically. In the Browser Launcher, the profile panel opens on whichever side has room, and the arrow keys follow that direction.

Safari Handoff works again

Opening a page from your iPhone via Handoff now lands in Safari on your Mac. BrowserFairy no longer intercepts the handoff and leaves the page unopened.

Special thanks

Thank you to Nikolaj for reporting the Safari Handoff issue and helping make BrowserFairy better.

BrowserFairy in System Settings

BrowserFairy now shows up in the Default web browser list in System Settings, under Desktop & Dock. Pick it there like any other browser, and every link on your Mac goes through your rules from then on.

Until now you had to set the default from inside BrowserFairy. That still works, and the in-app status now updates as soon as you change it. See Set your default browser for both ways.

Firefox launches reliably

Firefox sometimes stalled on a cold start when a rule sent a link to a specific profile. The launch path was simplified, and Firefox now opens the link on the first try, profile included.

Jump to a browser by typing its letter

The Browser Launcher is quicker to drive from the keyboard. Open it with ⌘⌥B, then type the first letter of the browser you want: G for Google Chrome, S for Safari, B for Brave, F for Firefox, M for Microsoft Edge. Each browser shows its letter right in the list, so there is nothing to memorize.

Numbers still work as before: press a number to launch that browser or profile directly.

Profiles in alphabetical order

Browser profiles in the launcher are now sorted by name. If you keep more than a couple of profiles per browser, the one you want is where you expect it.

Read more in Browser Launcher and Keyboard shortcut and modifier.

The new Browser Launcher

The Browser Selector grew up and got a new name. The Browser Launcher is a compact panel you open from anywhere on your Mac with ⌘⌥B. Pick a browser, drill into a profile, press a number to launch. It also appears whenever a link has no matching rule and you asked BrowserFairy to let you choose.

You can move the launcher panel, set the shortcut, and decide what happens for unmatched links in Settings. See Browser Launcher.

Route links into browser profiles

Rules can now send a link into a specific browser profile, such as your Work profile in Chrome or a client profile in Firefox. Profile routing is part of BrowserFairy Pro and takes a one-time setup per browser. See Browser profiles.

Better browser extension integration

The Safari, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions hand the current page back to BrowserFairy more reliably, so a page that opened in the wrong browser is one click away from the right one. See Browser extensions.

Also in this release

• Rules import and export use a versioned file format, so backups made today keep working with future versions.
• BrowserFairy detects when it has lost the default browser role and cleans up stale registrations.