How to Open Links in a Specific Browser Profile on macOS
Browser profiles are how most of us keep our digital lives from bleeding into each other. One profile for work email and calendars, one for personal shopping and banking, maybe a third for a side project with its own logins. The trouble starts the moment you click a link. macOS hands it to whichever browser is set as default, which usually means whichever profile happens to be in front, which is rarely the one you wanted.
The result is a familiar little dance: the link opens in the wrong profile, you copy the URL, switch windows, and paste it where it belonged. A dozen times a day that adds up, and worse, sometimes you forget to switch and end up logged into the wrong account on the wrong page.
Why macOS makes this hard
macOS only lets you choose a single default browser application. It has no concept of a default profile, and no built-in way to say "open work links in my Work profile and everything else in Personal." Chrome and Edge can target a profile from the command line, Safari can only be steered through the Accessibility API, and Firefox uses named profiles with its own flag. None of that is exposed to a normal click.
So the link goes to your default browser, lands in the active profile, and you are left to sort it out by hand.
The reliable fix: route at click time
The clean solution is to put a small router between the click and the browser. Instead of macOS sending links straight to Chrome or Safari, it sends them to a lightweight app that asks, or already knows, which profile each link belongs in, then launches that exact profile with the URL.
This is exactly what Burly does. It registers as the system handler for http and https links, and when you click one it shows a fast picker of every browser profile it found on your Mac. Pick Work, Personal, or any other, and the link opens there. No copying, no window shuffling, no logging into the wrong account.
Because Burly reads your real profiles directly from each browser, the picker always reflects what you actually have installed. Add a profile in Chrome and it appears automatically. There is nothing to configure by hand.
Making it effortless
A picker on every click would get old, so the routing is keyboard-first and gesture-aware. Hold a modifier key as you click to bypass the picker and reuse your last destination, or invert that behavior so a bare click goes straight through and a held key brings up the picker. The point is to spend a fraction of a second deciding only when the destination is ambiguous, and zero seconds when it is obvious.
Everything happens locally on your Mac. The links you open never leave your device, which matters when those links carry tokens, account ids, or anything you would rather not send to a server.
The short version
macOS will not route links to a specific browser profile on its own. Put a profile-aware router in front of the click, let it open the right profile every time, and the copy-paste-switch dance disappears. That is the entire idea behind Burly.