Burly v1.5.0 Is Multilingual

Until today, Burly only spoke English. That was fine for me and less fine for a lot of the people who use it. Browser profiles are not an English-speaking habit: plenty of people keep a work profile and a personal one in Tokyo, São Paulo, Seoul, and Berlin, and they deserve an app that talks to them in their own language.

Burly 1.5.0 does. It is the biggest change to the app since launch, even though nothing about how it routes a link looks any different.

Which languages does Burly support?

Nine, counting English:

1. English
2. Spanish (Español)
3. Brazilian Portuguese (Português)
4. Japanese (日本語)
5. Korean (한국어)
6. French (Français)
7. German (Deutsch)
8. Simplified Chinese (简体中文)
9. Traditional Chinese (繁體中文)

Everything you see is translated: the picker, every Settings pane, onboarding, the menu bar menu, permission prompts, and the update dialogs. If your Mac uses a language that is not on the list yet, Burly falls back to English.

How do you switch Burly to another language?

You do not have to do anything. Burly follows the language your Mac already uses, so if macOS is in Japanese, Burly is in Japanese the first time it opens.

If you want Burly in a different language from the rest of your Mac, macOS can do that per app:

1. Open System Settings, then General, then Language & Region.
2. Under Applications, click the add button and choose Burly.
3. Pick the language you want Burly to use.
4. Quit Burly from its menu bar icon and open it again.

Safari profiles now work in every language

Translating the app turned up a real bug. To open a Safari profile, Burly presses the matching New Window item in Safari's File menu through the Accessibility API, because Safari has no other way to launch into a named profile. Burly found those menu items by their English titles. On a Mac set to German or Japanese, Safari's menus are in German or Japanese, so Burly could not find them, and Safari profile links quietly opened in the wrong place. Arc had the same problem with its New Window item.

Burly now finds those menu items by an internal identifier Safari and Arc attach to them, which never changes with the language. I checked it with Safari running in Japanese, German, and Chinese. If you tried Burly on a non-English Mac before and gave up on Safari profiles, this release is worth another look.

The website speaks your language too

The site you are reading is translated into the same languages, with every page under its own address: /es, /pt, /ja, /ko, /fr, /de, /zh, and /zh-hant. The first time you visit, it picks up your browser's language, and the language menu in the header switches it any time. Checkout for a Supporter license and the emails that go with it, restoring a license and contacting support, arrive in the language you were reading.

What else is in 1.5.0?

Two smaller things. Settings has a new Accessibility pane, and Reduce animations now lives there. And when Chrome, Brave, Edge, or another Chromium browser is already running, Burly hands a profile link straight to it. Before, a link that arrived right after Chrome had updated itself could stall for a few seconds behind a second bouncing Dock icon. The full list, for this release and every earlier one, is in the release notes.

Help me get the wording right

I do not speak all of these languages, and I would rather know about an awkward phrase than have you put up with it. If a label reads oddly, a term is not what your Mac calls it, or a translation is simply wrong, tell me in the Burly Discord. Traditional Chinese in particular is new and would benefit from a native speaker's eye.

To get 1.5.0, click the Burly menu bar icon and choose Check for Updates, or download the latest build from this site. Your profiles, hotkeys, and settings carry over unchanged.