SME Site Specific Browser (SSB) for Mac Leopard. We use SSB’s ourselves quite a lot for email and also for online calendar applications. We thought therefore it would be good fun to release SSB’s for some of our apps. The first one we threw together is for SMEStorage. Just download it, unzip it, drag it to your applications folder. 10.8: Open a specific browser based on the URL Authored by: tomsep on Sep 10, '14 11:52:55PM Hi, I tested it on 10.9 and it does work as described - very strange (sorry, not that much helpful, I.

Nowadays, people are turning to Web-based applications as replacements for desktop applications. Web-based office suites, mail clients, multimedia apps, and general productivity tools are all extremely useful now, but standard Web browsers aren’t always the best option for running applications. To provide a more suitable tool for Web-based apps, Mozilla Platform Evangelist Mark Finkle has been working on, a site-specific browser (SSB) that’s designed to work exclusively with one application at a time. It’s not finished yet, but it’s already showing promise.WebRunner, at version 0.5 now, is a stripped-down version of Firefox that allows you to run a single site at a time in its own process. The browser has a minimal user interface with no toolbars or navigation UI — just a window with the bare minimum needed to use applications like Google Reader, Flickr, Web-based help desks, or any Webmail client.

The rationale for SSBsWhy would you want a site-specific browser when you can just use Firefox (or another browser) to view sites? It doesn’t make much of a difference if Firefox doesn’t quite render a publication’s Web site exactly the same way another browser does, but it makes a major difference to customers when an application fails to work in a particular browser.Developers and users alike are getting sick of browser incompatibilities. Many Web developers have no doubt gone prematurely bald trying to cope with the armada of browsers that they’re asked to support, and Linux users are bitten by this issue all the time with IE-specific sites.There are also good reasons to run some Web-based applications separately from the main browser session. For one thing, if your regular session of Firefox crashes, it won’t take down the SSB you’re using for a productivity application.

An SSB also provides additional security; over the years Firefox and other browsers have had vulnerabilities that may have allowed exploits to read data from other pages or sessions. Financial firms might want to offer a SSB so users can interact with their online services exclusively with fewer opportunities for phishing and fraud.An SSB allows developers to deploy a simplified application interface. Technically, the user doesn’t need to know that it’s a browser-based application at all.

Once WebRunner matures a bit, it should be trivial to deploy a package with WebRunner customized to load any site without the user needing to know anything more than “click here to start the application.”Finally, WebRunner should also allow opportunities for customization that other browsers (including Firefox) do not. Extensions for Firefox need to play nicely with many Web sites, whereas extensions and customizations to a SSB need to apply only to a single Web site or service. Getting and running WebRunnerTo get WebRunner, visit the on the Mozilla wiki and grab the appropriate installer for your platform. You can choose between packages for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, or grab the source code.Next, on Linux, unpack the tarball and run the installer. Alternately, you can grab the archive tarball, unpack it where you want WebRunner to “live,” and just run it from there.

This is the approach I’ve been using.Under the webrunner directory, you’ll see an executable called (what else?) webrunner. You’ll also see several profiles, which have a.webapp extension. A profile tells WebRunner what site to load, and provides a few additional parameters that control the browser’s behavior.

To start, for instance, the Google Reader Webapp./webrunner -webapp greader.webappIt couldn’t be easier. Well, maybe it could, but only if the Moz folks came over and started it up for you. Google Reader will load normally and you can browse your feeds to your heart’s content. If you click on one of the links to open a page outside Google Reader, it will load in your default browser — in my case Firefox.On Mac OS X, you can run WebRunner just by clicking on one of the.webapp files after you’ve installed WebRunner. Presumably, this is also the case on Windows, but I haven’t actually tested the Windows functionality.

Creating your own profilesWhat if you don’t want to run a program in one of the bundled profiles? No problem — you can create a custom profile.Finkle has provided a few sample profiles for Google services, but if you want to use WebRunner for other sites, it’s easy enough to whip out your own profile with just a minute or two of tweaking in the text editor of your choice. Let’s take a look at a sample. Parametersuri=uri parameter is fairly self-explanatory — just slap in the URI/URL that you want to load here.

WebRunner supports SSL, so you can use an HTTPS URI if you want to have a secure connection.The icon parameter is the icon that will be used as the application icon for this instance of WebRunner. Icons are saved under the WebRunner directory in chrome/icons/default as XPixMap files. If you don’t have an icon, you can just specify webrunner and the system will use the default WebRunner icon.Finally, you can customize the behavior of WebRunner by setting the showstatus, showlocation, and enablenavigation parameters. If you enable showstatus, WebRunner will display the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. Enabling showlocation allows you to see, but not modify, the URI. Unlike a typical Firefox instance, the location bar is read-only.

WebRunner doesn’t sport a navigation bar, but if you set enablenavigation=yes, users can press hotkeys to navigate back and forth through the browsing history. Enabling pluginsOne of the things I noticed straight away was that WebRunner didn’t recognize Flash on my system, even though I have it installed. On Linux, you can enable Flash in WebRunner by copying or linking the files flashplayer.xpt and libflashplayer.so under webrunner/xulrunner/plugins and restarting WebRunner.Extensions are not yet supported; there’s no way to install extensions using the WebRunner interface, and no obvious way to install them manually either. However, extension support is on the roadmap and should be available in future versions of WebRunner.WebRunner is in early development, but has a lot of promise, and is useful now. A site-specific browser has a number of interesting use cases, and I’m glad to see one coming out of the Firefox community.Category:.

Internet & WWW.

2.0.2, 23 February 2012)(ver. 1.0.2, 01 November 2011)(ver. 2.5.7, 04 September 2012)(ver. Utility driver spca1528 v2220 m driver for mac. 2.4.4, 10 November 2012)(ver.

My preferred browser is Chrome (for all kinds of reasons, including speed and integration with apps I like), but certain company intranet and subscription sites, like timesheets and research tools, only work in IE7.

I have Windows 7 and know about the possibility of assigning different defaults to different protocols, but I specifically need ~5 sites (which are my IE “Favorites”) to launch automatically in IE through links and through Launchy. Anyone know how I might make this happen through the Defaults pane in Windows 7, Launchy, or command script settings?

1. None of the above suggestions solve the actual problem. I have the same issue.
   I have Chrome as default browser, but I would like to open company intranet links from emails to IE, as Chrome does not fully support all our intranet features.

2. The above methods opens pages as separate instances, different IE window for each page. How could you do this and utilize tabs, one instance of IE with multiple tabs..

   • I have tested my method..it opens the file in a new tab of IE not new window.I think you try first ! using shortcuts of the same html file in the startmenu, quick launch or anywhere else will do exactly what is mentioned in the question. and will become more handy.
     thank you.

3. 1. go to your favorite web site:
   2. save webpage in html format by pressing ctrl+s on desktop (or any where)
   3. now go to desktop (or wherever you saved the webpage)
   4.right click on the webpage and to go to properties (the last option)
   5.now set internet explorer as default program to open that hmt/html page by changing the open with.
   6.now you can double click it and it will open in I.exlporer (you will also notice the icon change)
   you can also create a shortcut on saved web page and place them anywhere on your pc. to access you favorite sites.
   Refresh the page after opening it, or click anywhere on a link to load the page normally which wil switch it to online from offline.

   • This method will save the page as actual html file, not just as a shortcut. I was going to recommend a similar method. You could make shortcuts to the pages you want to open, then type the shortcut name in Launchy to open it. Or you could set a keyboard shortcut to open each page, for example:
     Ctrl + Alt + F could open Facebook
     Ctrl + Alt + G could open Google, etc.

     • actually if you create just a shortcut, without saving the web page, it will be opened in the default web browser. which is not IE in this case,m thats why i suggested to create an html file. and then create its shortcut, then only it can work.

4. Elise,

   did any of the solutions above work for you? Please let us know. Thank you!

5. Since you prefer Chrome why don't you take a look into the 'Internet Explorer' tab extensions?

   https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search?category=ext&q=IE+tab
   (the first few results of that search)

6. Why not set your Internet Explorer's homepages to those of which you only want to open with Internet Explorer, then configure Chrome's homepage to those you only want to open in Chrome?

   You can also do this via a batch application. Open up a notepad and chose 'File' -> 'Save As' -> Save it to your desktop. The file name can be anything as long as it ends in '.bat', an example is 'launch.bat'. Then for 'Save As Type' chose 'All Files' and press Save.

   Then paste this into the notepad and press save again:
   @echo off
   start iexplore http://www.yahoo.com/
   start http://www.google.com/

   This will cause 'iexplore' (internet explorer) to launch yahoo.com, however it will force 'google.com' to open in your default web browser. So as long as Google chrome is your default web browser, google will open only in Chrome. You can add more lines to it as follows (replace the original file's contents with this):

   @echo off
   start iexplore http://www.yahoo.com/
   start iexplore //www.makeuseof.com/
   start iexplore http://www.facebook.com/
   start http://www.google.com/
   start http://www.youtube.com/
   start http://www.amazon.com/

   Then save it and open 'launch.bat'.