I’ve been Flashless for some time now[^1], but it is kind of a pain using the Develop menu in Safari to open up Flash-dependent websites in Chrome as John Gruber originally described. You can use a hotkey and an AppleScript to make things more reliable, or there’s probably a way to use Services to do this, but I just wanted a button that I could press in Safari. A perfect job for a Safari Extension!

The top Google hit for safari extension open in chrome, as of this writing, is a combination Safari Extension and helper application called Open in Chrome written by Reuben Bijl.

I like the idea, but it wasn’t working quite right for me: if Chrome wasn’t already open[^2], I’d end up with a blank window hiding the page that was just opened via the Safari extension a moment earlier. If you look at the previously linked TUAW article and comments, you’ll see this kind of problem is not unusual.

The smart thing to do would have probably been to contact the author[^3], but instead I just make my own version. It’s MIT-licensed, the helper application is written in AppleScript, and the source is up on GitHub, so go ahead and give it a try and/or hack away.

See the project page on GitHub for the download and usage instructions.

[^1]: my MacBook Air has never even had the Flash plugin installed on it

[^2]: it almost never is on my machine

[^3]: it isn’t open source as far as I can tell