Quick Switch Default Browser

These days I run a few different browsers. My baseline default browser is the Mullvad Browser; when I open a URL its in this browser. Leaking the least amount of information.

When I want persisted sessions, I jump over to Firefox but with uBlock Origin and NoScript which prompts me to make decisions about each and every domain that tries to load a resource.

And when I don’t want to fuck around with various privacy antics, I load up Safari.

What I found was that I would want to shift my default browser to accomodate some odd task I was attempting. So today I wrote an Emacs 📖 function to help me quickly set my default browser. This leverages the defaultbrowser MacOS shell command.

Here’s the interactive command that makes this change quicker:

(defun jf/default-browser (&optional name)
  "Set the default browser based on the given NAME."
  ;; brew install defaultbrowser
  (interactive (list
                 (completing-read
                   "Browser: "
                   '("mullvadbrowser" "firefox" "safari"))))
  (shell-command (concat "defaultbrowser " name)))

This is a minor quality of life improvement, but one that helps me navigate a surveillance capitalism hell-scape.