Browser Select

Choose between browsers when opening links.

Browser Select lets you pick the browser a link opens in, at the moment you click it.

It registers itself as a web browser, hence every link another application opens goes to it first. A small popup lists the browsers installed on the system, and you pick one with the mouse or the keyboard.

Browser Select is built from source. It needs Zig 0.16 or newer and the GTK4, GLib and Wayland development files:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix ~/.local

That writes ~/.local/bin/browserselect and ~/.local/share/applications/browserselect.desktop. Set --prefix /usr/local for a system wide install instead.

To make it the default browser use the following commands:

update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
xdg-settings set default-web-browser browserselect.desktop

If the set default-web-browser command returns something along the lines of xdg-settings: $BROWSER is set and can't be changed with xdg-settings then you can still set Browser Select for individual schemes and mimes:

xdg-mime default browserselect.desktop x-scheme-handler/http
xdg-mime default browserselect.desktop x-scheme-handler/https
xdg-mime default browserselect.desktop text/html

Clicking a link anywhere should bring up Browser Select. Move through it with the arrow keys and open the selected browser with Return. You can also press 1 to 9 to open that entry straight away, or simply click it with the mouse.

The Escape key closes the popup without opening anything. Clicking elsewhere and letting the popup lose focus does the same.

You can also call Browser Select manually using:

browserselect https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com

If you call it without an address the picked browser is started on its own. If you enable caching in the config then Browser Select will remember the choice for the amount of time specified by timeout and won't ask you again when you click another link, and simply open the link in the previously selected browser.

Configuration is optional and read from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/browserselect/config.toml, or from $HOME/.config/browserselect/config.toml when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is unset. config.example.toml shows how to configure it.

The window can be made translucent if you would want it to be using the [menu] option opacity (values from 0.1 to 1.0). Compositors that implement the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol, such as KWin 6.7, Hyprland 0.56, niri 26.04, Mutter 51 and COSMIC, additionally blur the background behind it as well because it seems like glass-like aesthetics are big these days. For example Sway, however, has no blur, but it can be simulated using static_blur = true under [menu], which makes Browser Select draw a blurred picture of the screen behind the window instead. Obviously if the background behind Browser Select is something that changes (e.g. video) this workaround won't work, but for your average r/unixporn post it should be fairly sufficient.

Copyright © 2026 マリウス

Browser Select is released under Version 1.1 of the SEGV License, whose full text is included in the LICENSE file. Go read it, there will be a test on it on Monday.