Can Burly open a link in a specific browser profile?
Yes. Burly lists every browser profile on your Mac as its own destination, so a click can go to Safari Work, Chrome Personal, or Firefox Dev instead of whichever window happens to be in front. It finds those profiles automatically as you add, rename, or remove them.
Most link routers stop at the browser: they can send a URL to Chrome, but not to the work profile inside Chrome. Burly treats the profile as the thing you choose. Open Settings and every profile is a row you can reorder, hide, or dress up with an emoji or account photo, a petal color, and its own shortcut key, so the picker becomes a board of faces you recognize at a glance. A typical weekday looks like this: a calendar invite from work Mail goes to the Work profile, a shopping receipt from personal Messages goes to Personal, and a docs link from a side-project Slack lands in the Dev profile, with no copy-paste between windows.
Where does the Burly picker appear when you click a link?
Right under your cursor. Click a link in Mail, Slack, Messages, or anywhere else and a radial picker springs open at that spot, the URL at its center and every profile one keystroke away. It vanishes the instant you choose.
You never hunt for a window or a menu bar extra to finish the click. The picker is already in memory because Burly runs as a resident menu bar agent, so it appears immediately rather than cold-launching. Press the profile key, click a petal, or hold your bypass modifier to skip it. A designer sharing a Figma link during a call can send it to Work without the picker covering the meeting; a late-night shopper can send a store link to Personal without it landing in a work window that will be screen-shared tomorrow.
Which browsers and Safari profiles does Burly support?
Safari (including Safari profiles), Chrome, Chrome Beta, Chrome Dev, and Chrome Canary, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Arc, Vivaldi, Chromium, Opera, Firefox, Firefox Developer Edition, and Zen. Safari profiles are real, targeted destinations, which most other macOS link routers cannot reach.
Chromium and Firefox profiles can be launched from the command line, so several apps manage those. Safari has no public launch API for a named profile; Burly is one of the few tools that still sends a link there, by driving Safari's own "New Profile Window" menu through the Accessibility API rather than AppleScript. If your work life lives in a Safari profile, that is the difference between a router you can actually use and one that silently drops those links in the wrong place. See the full list on the supported browsers page, and the dedicated Safari profile switcher guide if that is the job you came here for.
Do you have to use the picker on every click?
No. A bare click opens the picker; hold your chosen modifier to skip it. Invert that in one toggle so a bare click goes straight through and a held key brings the picker up, and choose what a skipped link opens: your last-used destination, or one browser profile you pin.
The default is built for mixed days, when some links are obvious and some are not. Hold Option (or whichever modifier you pick) on the tenth Jira link in a row and it reopens Work without asking; click a personal newsletter without the modifier and the picker still asks, because that one might belong in Personal or in a shopping profile. The gesture and the destination are separate settings, so you can also invert the gesture and pin a profile under What to open: then every link lands in Chrome Work, and the picker is the thing you opt into by holding the key. Either way, the decision lives at click time rather than in a rules file you have to keep current.
Can Burly always open links in one browser profile?
Yes. Set What to open to a specific browser profile and turn on Invert, and every link goes straight there. Hold your modifier when a link belongs somewhere else and the picker blooms so you can choose. Leave What to open on Last Used and the bypass follows whichever profile you used most recently instead.
This is the setup for people whose links always belong in one browser profile, or nearly always: a contractor who works out of Chrome Work all day, or anyone tired of external links landing in whichever profile a browser happened to have in front. The pinned profile is a standing default, not a guess. Choosing another profile from the picker or a global hotkey opens that link there and does not quietly move the default, and the profile that is currently active never overrides it. If the pinned profile is ever unavailable, say the browser was uninstalled, Burly shows the picker and says so rather than dropping the link into some other profile.
Can you open a browser profile with a keyboard shortcut on a Mac?
Yes. A global hotkey, your chosen prefix (Hyper by default) plus the profile's own key, drops you straight into a fresh tab from anywhere, no link required. The same shortcuts live in the menu bar under Open New Tab in.
This is the other half of routing: sometimes you are not clicking a link, you just want the work browser in front of you. Press the prefix plus 1 and Work opens to a new tab, the whole trick behind opening a browser profile with a keyboard shortcut; prefix plus 0 always reopens whichever profile you used last. Burly auto-assigns keys so this works the moment it is installed, and you can rebind any of them. It is the difference between hunting through Safari's profile menu or Chrome's avatar picker and having the right context appear before you have finished the thought.
Does Burly stay out of the way when you are not clicking a link?
Yes. Burly is a menu bar app, not a browser and not a Dock fixture. Launch it at login and, if you want it fully out of sight, hide the menu bar icon. It only steps in when a link needs a home.
There is no account, no window to manage, and no dashboard to check. After you set it as the default web browser in System Settings, under Desktop & Dock, every http and https click is handed to Burly first. The rest of macOS looks the same. People who already live in a crowded menu bar can hide the icon and keep the picker, the bypass, and the hotkeys. People who like a status check can leave the icon up and confirm at a glance that Burly is still the default handler.
Does Burly support Dark Mode on the Mac?
Yes. In the Appearance pane, choose System, Light, or Dark. System follows your Mac as it switches between Light and Dark Mode, and the picker, Settings, and the welcome window all change with it. A live preview shows the picker before your next click.
A bright white picker blooming over a dark desktop at night is the kind of thing you notice every single time. In Dark, every petal color has its own hand-picked deep shade, so a profile you tinted green still reads as green, just quieter. The preview at the bottom of the pane shows the picker exactly as it will appear, and Image position sits right above it, so you can see an emoji or account photo move as you change it.
Can you turn off the picker animation?
Yes. Turn on reduce animations and the picker appears fully expanded instead of springing open from the center. It is the same destinations and the same keys, without the motion.
This is for vestibular sensitivity, for screen recordings where a bloom is distracting, and for anyone who just prefers things still. The setting is a single switch in the Accessibility pane of Burly’s settings, with nothing else to configure. Keyboard selection, the bypass modifier, and last-used routing all keep working. If macOS Reduce Motion is already on, you will feel at home: Burly is matching that preference for the one piece of UI it adds to a click.
Does Burly work with VoiceOver?
Yes, all the way through. When a link arrives, VoiceOver moves into the picker and announces where you are choosing to open it. Each profile reads as a button with its name, its key, and whether it was last used, and focus follows your keyboard selection.
The picker is a circle of petals, which is easy to see and easy to get wrong for a screen reader, so it reads in a fixed order: the center first, then the petals clockwise. Escape closes it. Settings and the first-run setup are covered too: every switch and menu is named after its visible label, each profile row says which profile it controls, colors and emoji are labeled, and you can reorder profiles with Move Up and Move Down instead of dragging.
WorkChrome profile
DevFirefox profile
PersonalSafari profile
