Here’s a silly idea I had. I don’t like to keep a bunch of icons in my Dock, preferring to use Bunch along with a simple set of persistent Dock apps. I do keep Firefox in the Dock, but I use a bunch of browsers for different purposes, so what if I could access all of them from the Dock without polluting it?

I use Choosy as my default browser. It allows me to pop up a menu or select a default browser whenever I open a link, based on custom rules. There are multiple variations of this idea, but Choosy is the original and still my favorite.

Choosy has a url scheme that you can use to pop up browser menus, among other things. So getting a menu of all my browsers is as easy as setting up a Shortcut to open x-choosy://prompt.all/URL. For this purpose, I’m using the Kagi search page as my URL, since that’s where most of my browsing sessions start.

You can also just open x-choosy://prompt.all/ to open a browser without opening a web page.

Then you can just right click on the Shortcut in the Shortcuts app and “Add to Dock,” position it where you want it, and you’re done. One click to open any of your browsers. I tried adding a custom icon to it, but failed, so I just have a “Shortcuts” icon in my Dock.

When I click the shortcut in the Dock, I get the Choosy browser menu, with my running browsers highlighted but all of my browsers accessible.

There’s probably a way to get it to work well as a Share item for URLs, but the fact is that if I’m opening a URL, I already have Choosy as a share option, and if I’m opening from a browser, I have a Choosy plugin to do it. I just want all of my browsers in my Dock without adding 10 icons to it permanently.

As a side note, I also set up an Open URL action in LeaderKey to do the same thing. When you hold down ⌘ while the browser picker is open, shortcut overlays appear on the browsers, so you can open any browser with a keyboard shortcut, making launching any browser keyboard-based. Of course, this is somewhat useless if you use a launcher like Alfred or LaunchBar, as your browsers are all a few keystrokes away anyway, so I’m just experimenting to see what my brain likes best…