This was about the time Scott and I started thinking that we should build our own solution. I actually thought Choosy was a good solution, but unfortunately there was a period of several years (almost six, actually) in which it sat still, with no updates or feature improvements. It provides very similar functionality to what we’ve delivered in Bumpr: click on a link and a menu of available browsers pops up instantly, right there. Later in the decade Choosy came along, which was a great improvement. It was more convenient than digging into Mac OS X’s preferences to accomplish the same thing, but it was still cumbersome. So if you came across a link that you wanted to open in a different browser that wasn’t currently set as your default, you’d pull down IC-Switch’s menu and change that setting. It was little more than a utility that sat in your Mac’s menu bar, where it provided a pull-down menu of the various web browsers, mail apps, FTP clients and even newsreaders (takes you back, right?) and RSS apps that you had installed. In the early Aughts I was using IC-Switch by Philippe Martin to solve this problem. So I’ve often needed to be able to switch back and forth between my browser of choice and whichever competitor has all of the most current compatibility advantages at a given time. This was mostly because I seem to have a curious habit of favoring browsers that are not the dominant market player-whether it was OmniWeb, Camino or even Firefox. I’ve been using multiple browsers for almost as long as I’ve been on the web. In truth, Bumpr started as an idea well before Scott and I first talked about it. Somtimes they come together very quickly, sometimes they trundle along aimlessly for many moons until they die quiet, unnoted deaths, and sometimes they manage to drag themselves across the finish line. That’s the nature of side projects, though. So we picked a tiny project just to get us back in the swing of things quickly. Mixel had been a big effort with big ambitions we were both very proud of what we had done but its ultimate failure was exhausting. It was the first collaboration he and I talked about after we sold our company Mixel way back in 2013. As I mentioned in my launch post we had been working on it as a side project for years. If you’re in this situation, you already know how much you need this app.When my pal Scott and I finally released Bumpr last week, it was both a moment of pride and a great relief. Bottom lineīumpr is a great tool if you juggle multiple web browsers and email clients. The developers informed me that this feature is definitely on their to-do list. I don’t have Flash installed on either of my Macs, so the only way I can view Flash content is with Chrome, because it contains its own built-in version of Flash. One thing I would like Bumpr to do is allow me to choose which web browser opens links from within a browser or even open an existing page in a different browser via Bumpr. The dimmed icon shows that Chrome is not running. Kirk McElhearn/IDGīumpr’s popup lets you choose which browser to use to open a link here I’m clicking a link in Evernote. You can have Bumpr automatically display the popup, or you can set it to only work when you first press the Shift key. You can choose which browsers and email clients display in its popup. Bumpr automatically detects your web browsers and email clients if not, just click a button to add them.
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