You may be wondering what I meant by the "best" browser in the previous paragraph. Another feature unique to Choosy is the capability to rank your browsers. Choosy's Browsers screen lists all programs that claim to handle Web URLs. By dragging individual programs up and down in the list, you rank those programs from most to least preferred; you can also force Choosy to ignore a program completely by unchecking the box next to the program's name. Unfortunately, as with Highbrow, you can't manually add programs to this list (although this feature is ).

As I mentioned in my review of Highbrow, links clicked within a browser open in that browser; Highbrow and Choosy intercept only those links you open from outside of Web browsers--for example, in an e-mail message, a word-processing document, or an HTML file you're editing. However, Choosy's developer has provided that, when selected, lets you open the current Web page in a different browser of your choosing. As someone who tends to use Safari for the majority of my browsing, switching to Firefox only for those sites that have problems in Safari, I love this feature: I set Choosy to open all links in Safari, but I use Choosy's bookmarklet to quickly open a page in Firefox. This bookmarklet works even if you have Choosy disabled. (You can also download an extension for Firefox and a SIMBL plug-in for Safari that add an "Open Link with Choosy" item to each browser's contextual menus.)

Unlike with Highbrow, you can't quickly change Choosy's behavior; for example, I like that I can use Highbrow's menu-bar menu to change its behavior back to "default browser" whenever I plan on using my default browser for a while. Which Choosy, I need to open System Preferences to make such a change, which is a hassle. I'd also like the capability to open a URL in my default browser--the OS X default, not the Choosy default--regardless of my current Choosy setting; for example, by clicking on a link while holding down a modifier key.

But to be fair, Choosy is still a beta. It's got a few bugs; for example, I often found that even if I had one of the automatic options--to use the best browser or my favorite browser--selected, Choosy would still pop up the browser picker. In addition, the developer . I'm looking forward to the first official release.