Project takeover or Fork

[Wayne Arthurton]

I know you are looking for a new owner. I have been managing my own personal fork for a few years.

I am not sure if it would be best to take over this project or create a fork and go forward. For ease of development and maintainability there are some changes I would make that make be better as a separate projects.

1. Remove support for older OS versions - removes need for OS version detection dll, allows me to spend more time on new features vs regression testing.
2. Remove support for older .net versions - allows me to spend more time on new features vs regression testing.
3. Add in a default browser option
4. Add in url rewrite support so that it can take the place of something like Search Deflector
5. Maybe rename. BC was a long time ago.

Move to Github, not because I dislike Bitbucket but:

1. That is where I ten to do more work
2. Discoverability

If you want to end it as BC2, and want me to start a newly named and forked giving credit and history to this project that is fine too.

[guy]

Good day,

I would prefer it stays here unless there is a way to easily copy over and redirect. Some people may have bookmarks set up that point to here. And the BC2 website points here but that is an easy change.

I agree with your points - and I had started to remove XP stuff. I don’t remember if I had finished it. There is also some work in progress to allow GPOs to control the settings. I intended to keep doing that but other things came up.

Also, BC2 does have an automatic update functionality. I never got it perfect but at least the notification system works. Basically it checks a file in this repo: https://bitbucket.org/gmyx/browserchooser2/src/master/Browser Chooser 2/PublicResources/PublicVersion.xml

I like the idea to drop the 2 - it was always a ‘band-aid’ to not being to reach the original owners.

‌

[samaje5055]

I support more visibility! There are a couple alternatives to BC2, but they aren’t nearly as polished and are closed source. Hope someone can continue this great work you started.

[guy]

Saw this over the weekend. Windows Power Toys for windows 10. Would be interesting to refactor the code into that tool. It would get a much broader audience.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/master/doc/devdocs#how-to-create-new-powertoys

If I get time in the near future I will dig into the possibility.

[Fernando Moura]

it’d be freaking awesome to have it inside PowerTools, also if possible make the popup window in dark mode theme as an option or automatic, and if possible add these three browsers and their anonymous modes too as DEFAULT like pre done for the average user just to activate instead of manually adding

PS kinda offtopic: I’ve noticed links redirected by the “Your Phone” app open directly inside Microsoft Edge and bypass BrowserChooser without any prompt because it uses thee protocol named “microsoft-edge”, unfortunately even after manually adding the protocol to BrowserChooser and making it as default the URL can’t be opened by the browsers, even Microsoft Edge itself, because BrowserChooser doesn’t know Edge can accept this protocol even after ticking the option “is Edge”.

for example when I send a normal youtube URL which is a simple HTTPS this is the garbage the “Your Phone” spits out and BrowserChooser can’t handle it at the moment so all options are greyed out
”microsoft-edge:?launchContext1=TimelineActivityId&launchContext2=ad81e16c-b460-424a-83d6-7dceef8f79ca&mmx-scid=ad81e16c-b460-424a-83d6-7dceef8f79ca&url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2F54v1dMZcD8M”

So my suggestion to fix this would be to add a function as an option in settings that automatically converts this garbage protocol into normal HTTPS or whatever it was previously

[Rob Randell]

Hey all.
I came here wondering if someone still needed to put their hand up to take over, but as Wayne has already done that that’s great - go to it (this is my first work in VB.net, so although I could volunteer, I should probably have at least a bit more experience!)

Anyway, I also have a fork in which I fixed a bug or two that stopped the thing from building and changed a few UI elements (mostly, in the first instance, letting the boxes expand in options, removing the colour that made Edge invisible (which looks horrible just now, but it’s set in a lot of places so I just changed my own config - this needs to be changed to actually be in the repo, I realise!).

I had started to remove the PosX and Y references and change them to PosRow and Col, then backtracked to have a check in that wasn’t too many things 😮

I also wanted to do a few other bits - have URLs be added automatically (optionally), add a shortcut to space to stop the countdown, have URLs added at the top of the list (or at least before my catch-all!), and have a way to show what rule(s) would match (and if multiple which one first), show numeric shortcuts without hovering the mouse, distinguish between browsers that have the same icon. Oh, and I briefly considered re-writing as C# (just due to my own experience, or lack of in VB.Net!). (I’ll check issues for these and enter them as time goes on. Just FYI here)

I too had the thought of trying to get this into powertools though - that would be cool. Maybe longer term?

I was going to submit a PR here, but can’t seem to do that (I’m not overly familiar with BitBucket).

Cheers for the project though guy, and I’ll check your fork Wayne in case you’ve done these things already!
Rob

[Rob Randell]

I’m new to Bitbucket and have a fairly basic question… how do I submit a PR from my fork to this? Am I missing permissions - as when I click Create New I am told “computer says no” or words to that effect. I think on GH when I’ve tried I’ve had permission to request a PR, even without project permissions

‌

[Rob Randell]

I’ve added a lot of things to this on my fork - happy for these to be merged back.
Bug fixes aside, these things include:

• Adding keyboard shortcut labels to the main display (and fixing those hotkeys - there was confusion in the code about column/row vs hotkey)
• Halting the countdown with Space (not configurable at the moment. Other things to do, I suspect, so may never be)
• Various small UI tweaks (disabling buttons if inappropriate, tweaking the info labels including warning that URLs are case sensitive and letting folks know you can use a single hotkey to launch multiple browsers)
• Added extra columns to Browsers (hotkey) and URLs (timeout)

I’ve added some issues to my own fork too as they’re my own thoughts of things I would find useful or, when giving this to someone else, things I realised would be useful to be told by the program.

I’ve only addressed the bugs that affect me, so I see and will look at some of the items on this list.

‌

[Dylan Vos]

Any progress on this? Would love to see it added to PowerToys as I am already using it!
Also quick question, is it normal that it takes a few seconds to open?

PS: If it was C# based, I would have loved to help - maybe one can think of a rewrite in the latest frameworks so it’s up to speed with how PowerToys is build?

[Rob Randell]

Hi @Dylan Vos .

‌

I have only ever done VB.Net on this project - my background was all C# so I do keep thinking of converting it (although I've now moved more to JS frameworks and UI coding and UX design work)

I'm sure it's not too hard to convert, and seeing your comment and knowing there's still some interest in a memory resident version for speed I might try to kick this off as a Christmas project. Although I have two small children... I'm not sure Christmas is a time I'll do lots of coding...

If it helps and you can do C# you wouldn't find it hard to code in VB.Net, I'm sure! I'd welcome help on my fork (https://bitbucket.org/Verbail/browserchooser2rrfork/downloads/))

‌