General Trick Blogger

There is this nifty free app called LinCastor that enables you to register your own handler for an URL. Although it had beed designed to register your own non-standard URL schemes, it can intercept standard http and https as well.

In LinCastor (which you need to double-click twice to fully open for editing): Add a new URL schemeChoose AppleScript handlerPaste the following code in, (replacing the stub code at the bottom): on handle_url(args) if (|URL| of args starts with "https://mail.google.") then tell application "Google Chrome" open location |URL| of args end tell else if (|URL| of args starts with "http://") then tell application "Firefox" open location |URL| of args end tell else tell application "Safari" open location |URL| of args end tell end return 1endObviously you should customize the code to suite your own specific needs. You can validate the script right in LinCastor before saving/activating it. I use the same mechanism to launch 'site specific browsers apps' created by Fluid. For example I have a JIRA app wrapper which looks for anything staring with http://issues.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. LinCastor requires OS X 10.8 or later. I tried it in 10.10 beta 2, and it also worked there. There's not much documentation for it, so tinker around a bit to get the result you want.]

If you want Google searches to go back to the modern style, you need to change your User-Agent string. For Safari, enable the Develop Window and use an option in there that works. Internet Explorer 9 (Windows) works, for example.

[crarko adds: I don't have an older system active at the moment to try this. It's inevitable that older software becomes obsolete, the same way older hardware does. I think the actual hint here is a reminder that if a site misbehaves, changing the user agent can be an effective troubleshooting tool.]