Selby is the "select browser" tool.

I needed to choose browsers dynamically on MacOS. The app I found quickly is apparently not free after two weeks. And Fable is still here in my subscription.

So I vibe-coded one. Never coded for MacOS before. But this appears to be functional and useful, so I'm keeping it and releasing it.

Selby registers as your default browser; when you click a link in any app, a small menu appears at the mouse pointer and you pick which real browser opens it. No Dock icon, no background daemon, no configuration files — a single menu-bar agent that macOS launches on demand.

Click a link anywhere. The picker appears at your cursor:

• Return opens the first browser in your list — the picker pre-selects it, so click → Enter is the whole flow. Drag your favorite to the top in Settings.
• ↑ / ↓ move the selection (wrapping); 1–9 open that row directly; Esc (or clicking anywhere else) dismisses.
• Hover and click work too.

Settings (the picker's gear button, the menu-bar globe, or open -a Selby) lets you toggle which browsers appear and drag them into your preferred order. Browsers are discovered automatically — a newly installed one shows up on its own.

Private windows: supported browsers also get a "Firefox (Private)" / "Google Chrome (Incognito)" / "Safari (Private)" entry. These start hidden — flip them on in Settings — and open the link in a private window even when a normal window of the same browser is frontmost. Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, and their beta/dev channels take a private-window command line; Safari has none, so Selby scripts it (see the permissions note under Install).

Requires macOS 14+ and the Xcode Command Line Tools (no Xcode needed).

scripts/build.sh --install

That one command does everything the system needs:

1. Builds and ad-hoc-signs the app.
2. Quits any running Selby (a live process would keep serving old code).
3. Copies it to ~/Applications/Selby.app.
4. Unregisters every other copy of Selby that LaunchServices knows about — old clones and build directories share the bundle ID, and macOS binds the default browser by bundle ID, so a stale registered copy can win the launch and "the old version keeps opening".
5. Registers the installed copy and relaunches it (the menu-bar globe).

Then make it the default browser: click "Make Selby the default browser…" in Selby's Settings, or pick Selby under System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Default web browser. Selby only catches link clicks while it is the system default.

To upgrade, run the same command again — it replaces, re-registers, and restarts in one shot. To uninstall, set a different default browser and delete ~/Applications/Selby.app.

Safari is the one browser without a private-window command line, so Selby opens it by scripting the UI (clicking File → New Private Window through accessibility, then handing the URL over via Apple Events). The first use asks for:

• Accessibility (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → enable Selby) — required to click the menu item.
• Automation prompts for "Safari" and "System Events" — click Allow.

No other browser needs any of this. Because Selby is ad-hoc signed, macOS ties these grants to the exact binary — after reinstalling you may have to re-grant Accessibility (toggle Selby off and on in that settings pane).

• Resources/Info.plist claims the http/https URL schemes, which is what makes macOS offer Selby as a default-browser choice.
• macOS hands clicked links to Selby via application(_:open:); Selby shows a non-activating floating panel (Spotlight-style, so it takes keyboard focus without stealing app activation) at the mouse location.
• The chosen browser gets the URL via NSWorkspace.open(_:withApplicationAt:configuration:). Private-window entries instead exec the browser's binary with its private flag (-private-window, --incognito, …) — macOS has no API to target a window mode, but every major browser forwards its command line to the running instance. Safari alone has no such flag; its private entry runs an osascript that clicks File → New Private Window (matched by its ⌘⇧N shortcut metadata, so it survives localization) and then sets the new window's URL.
• Browsers are discovered with NSWorkspace.urlsForApplications(toOpen:) — no hardcoded browser list.
• Selby is a menu-bar-only agent (LSUIElement); it does not need to run at login, because macOS launches the default browser on demand.

swift run selby-tests   # unit tests for the pure picker logic (exit 0/1)

The GUI layer is covered by the executable harness in SMOKE-TEST.md. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the testing gates and conventions.

MIT © Dmitry "Dima" Korolev