If you're a true geek, then you love experimenting with and comparing all the different Web browsers on the market today. You might have a default browser of choice for rendering most Web pages, but you still keep a number of other browsers available for their usefulness, their speed, or their compatibility in synchronizing to devices you already own (cough the iPhone cough). It's fun to surf the net in different ways. And, depending on the Web site, you might also need to have other options on hand in case a site fails to work in one rendering engine.
So how, then, do you toggle between these browsers? Sure, you could assign each to your right-click context menu and scroll through the "open with..." choices each time you need to switch to a new app. That's kind of ugly and tedious, don't you think? A fun little application called Browser Chooser improves this process by giving you a pretty little GUI for selecting your browser of choice whenever you want to pull up a page. It's a lightweight utility that's as easy to configure as it is to use, giving you the flexibility to pull up a number of different rendering engines at the touch of a button.
Click on the main "Browser Chooser" link and a pretty transparent window pops up with large icons representing the various browsers installed on your system. You can configure up to five separate browsers to appear in this little display, representing the "Big Five" choices that currently exist--Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Each can be given its own customized icon or display name, and you can even specify a list of links that always load whenever you launch said browser through Browser Chooser.
Browser Chooser automatically checks for updates to the app on its own and even comes with the option for showing you the URL you clicked on when you're trying to think of what browser to use. Register this program as your "default" browser of choice and you'll always be able to launch Browser Chooser when you click on a hyperlink from a non-browser application, like an offline email client or instant message window. It sure beats having to copy and paste the link into an individual browser, eh?
Every Wednesday, Maximum PC picks a new free or shareware download as its favorite of the week. Have a nifty application that you can't live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.
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