Epichrome met all my criteria above with help from BrowserFairy or Choosy, although a recent significant update caused it to open external links clicked in Google Docs internally and send them to my main Web browser-an annoying duplication. Grammarly has extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but not all SSBs support browser extensions.įor a few years, I’ve relied on the free Epichrome, a Chrome- or Brave-based SSB created by Github user dmarmor (see “ Make Site-Specific Browsers with Google Chrome,” 6 March 2015). Typos, doubled words, and other mistakes creep through in anyone’s writing, and while I don’t take many of Grammarly’s writing suggestions, it’s essential for catching hard-to-see errors. Grammarly support: I’m a grudgingly huge fan of the Grammarly writing assistant service.Second, having them open in Brave makes it easy for me to view them on my left-hand screen while writing on my right-hand screen. First, it’s what I expect-all clicked links other than should open in Brave. I want those links to open in my default Web browser-Brave at the moment-for two reasons. Send external links to my default Web browser: I frequently click links in articles to read them or test that they go to the right place.(It very well may open in the wrong window, but that’s a trivial annoyance.) SSBs can’t control URL destinations on their own, of course, but there are Mac utilities that can-I’ve tested BrowserFairy and Choosy and will discuss them more at the end. Receive incoming Google Docs links: When I click a URL in Slack or Trello for TidBITS, or in Mimestream or Discourse for FLRC, I want it to open in a new tab in my Google Docs app.The SSB thus needs to allow both and to co-exist in the same app. Multiple domain support: I always keep the Google Drive Web app open as the first tab in each of those windows, and I double-click documents in Google Drive to open them in new tabs.I always keep one window open for TidBITS documents and another for FLRC documents each has between 3 and 20 open tabs at any one time. Window and tab support: I work on a lot of documents, partly while juggling multiple TidBITS articles, but even more so in my role as president of the Finger Lakes Runners Club, which relies heavily on Google Docs and Google Sheets for administration, collaboration, and recordkeeping.Plus, I always switch to my primary word processor from wherever I am in other apps by pressing F1-that’s a Keyboard Maestro macro now, but I’ve been doing this since before Keyboard Maestro existed.Īpart from the core desire to turn Google Docs into a standalone app, I have several other requirements: (“Hi, my name is Adam, and I’m a tabaholic.”) As a result, I’ve always run Google Docs in a site-specific browser (SSB)-a utility that lets you turn a particular site or set of sites into a standalone app that has its own identity in the Dock, the App Switcher, and so on. That’s unacceptable for me since I often have multiple documents open along with way too many tabs for pages that I need to read, refer back to, or act on. Of course, Google Docs is a Web app, and by default, it would nestle in among all the other tabs in a Web browser. And when we migrated to our current WordPress-based content management system (see “ Next-Generation TidBITS Infrastructure in the Works,” 20 November 2017), we switched to doing all of our article writing and editing in Google Docs, which offers top-notch collaboration capabilities. During our BBEdit years, we switched the collaboration side to the Subversion version control system, essentially treating our text like code (see “ Wanted: Better Document Collaboration System,” 3 April 2006). When we used Nisus Writer Classic, we also relied on a fileserver running AppleShare over IP to collaborate on files using a classic IN (available for editing) and OUT (checked out by someone) folder/versioning/renaming scheme. Precisely which app we rely on for TidBITS has changed over the years, starting with Nisus Writer Classic, then BBEdit, and now Google Docs. The Best Mac Site-Specific Browser for Google DocsĪs a writer, I live in my word processor. #1641: LastPass breached, Live Text aids recipe input, fix for failed MobileDeviceUpdater installs.#1642: How to identify phishing attacks, new iPhone and iPad passcode requirements.#1643: New Mac mini and MacBook Pro models, new second-gen HomePod, security-focused OS updates, industry layoffs.#1644: Explaining Mastodon and the Fediverse, HomePod Software 16.3 and tvOS 16.3, GoTo breach.
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