Choose another browser for opening links

dstillman · February 15, 2020

This discussion was created from comments split from: Available for beta testing: Zotero Connector for Safari 13.

unlimitedfox · February 15, 2020

@zotero-developer: It would be nice to choose another browser to open weblinks in zotero. So we could use for example firefox to look for new papers and save them in zotero as long as we have no stable safari extension.

dstillman · February 15, 2020

Zotero opens links in your system's default browser. You can configure that how you like. We're unlikely to offer the ability to choose a different browser for links from Zotero.

jamesnicholas · February 16, 2020

I know of a couple of different external applications on macOS where you can set a rule where links opened from a specific application (in this case Zotero) can always be opened with a specific browser.

Choosy (https://www.choosyosx.com) Paid, offers 45 day free trial

Finicky (https://github.com/johnste/finicky) Free

Choosy worked well for this, it's fairly user friendly and intuitive to use, but I only tested it for the free trial period.

With Finicky, following their installation instructions and using a config file with:

 module.exports = {
  defaultBrowser: "Safari",
  handlers: [
    {
    // Open any link clicked in Zotero in Firefox
    match: ({ sourceBundleIdentifier }) =>
     sourceBundleIdentifier === "org.zotero.zotero",
    browser: "Firefox"
},
  ]
};

appears to work for me in the quick 5 mins of testing I've just done - all links from Zotero open in Firefox, any other link from another application will open in Safari.

Otherwise some of the other alternatives here may also have similar functionality: https://alternativeto.net/software/choosy/

beroe · April 27, 2020

Thanks @jamesnicholas . Very useful.
Because I'm using the beta version, I had to change the bundle identifier to org.zotero.zotero-beta

Seems like this would be almost trivial to implement natively?