How to: Change your Mac’s default browser
Apple’s WebKit-based Safari browser is pretty fast and quite compatible. Nevertheless, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and, if you’re a social media maven, it’s not endlessly extensible like Firefox. Here’s how to change your default browser Safari to anything and back again.
Generally speaking, Apple puts preferences and controls just where you’d think they should be. So, the system wide setting can be found in OS X’s System Preferences, right?
Well, wrong, to set your Mac’s default browser you need to jump through these few hoops:
• Open Safari -> Preferences (⌘ + comma) and click “General”
• From “Default web browser” pull down menu pick the browser you’d like to use as your default browser
Tip: For a browser installed on your Mac to show up in the drop down menu, you must have opened it at least once. So, if you just downloaded Opera, or whatever, and want to you use as your default, you’ll need to run it at least once before you can chose it as your default browser.
Of course, to revert to Safari as your default, just follow the above steps in reverse — it’s the Hansel and Gretel bread crumb trick.
Chrome? Never heard of it…
And, what you might ask is Stainless (item highlighted on the pull menu above)? Well, it’s a WebKit-based browser for the Mac that’s based on Google’s Chrome with a one important difference — you can actually get it and use it right now. As opposed to being a steaming pile of vaporware, Stainless is a real, useable, shipping browser (see also: You’ve gotta put Stainless on your list) that’s wicked fast and includes some of the marquis features of Chrome, like running each browser window as a separate task so those nasties, like Flash animations or flaky JavaScript, can’t bring down the whole application.
Hey, but I digress.
Got any hot, sweet cool tips for Safari, Firefox, Stainless, etc? Share and anecdote and a link in the comments below…
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