3 ms·
Ask HN: How can I make Mail/Messages links open in Incognito by default?
Whenever I click a link on my computer (e.g, from email or Messages), it opens by default in my browser of choice, but never in an Incognito window.
Nearly 100% of the time, I want it to open in Incognito, which I use whenever I'm visiting a site that I don't need to be logged into. My current workaround is to right-click the link, copy link, switch to my browser, open a new Incognito window, paste in the link and hit return. While this doesn't seem like that big a deal, it's actually a lot of clicks (11 key presses) — compared to just one click to open a link normally. Additionally, it puts the pasted link into my pasteboard manager, which is unnecessary and annoying when I go to retrieve a snippet that is now further down in the stack.
What's the best way to handle this? I've considered switching my default browser to a different browser that completely blocks cookies and forgets history all the time, but it seems like there should be a better solution.
- jameshiew 4y agoSince you mention Mail/Messages, I assume you are on macOS. I had a similar issue - wanting to always open links from Slack in Chrome, but links from elsewhere in Brave. I use Choosy[1] which works well for me, but there look to also be some free/libre alternatives, like Browserosaurus[2] (which I've never tried). [1]: https://www.choosyosx.com/ https://www.choosyosx.com/ [2]: https://github.com/will-stone/browserosaurus https://github.com/will-stone/browserosaurus
- gnicholas 4y agoNice, thanks! As I think about this, it seems like it might be best solved at the browser level, and perhaps a privacy-oriented browser like Brave would enable an external-links-in-incognito setting.
- mijkal 4y agoI use Finicky to seamlessly route links to the right place (browsers and apps, such as Zoom so you don't have to bounce in a browser then the app). You can use the args param in the browser callback to get incognito mode for your matches (I've confirmed this snippet works for Brave; others may vary): browser: ({ urlString }) => ({ name: 'Brave Browser', args: ['-incognito', urlString], }), https://github.com/johnste/finicky https://github.com/johnste/finicky