🚀 How to Seamlessly Switch Between Browsers in Your Web App with browser-switcher

Aleksandr Zakharov — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 07:49:19 +0000

Seamlessly open links in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, Opera, Samsung Internet, Vivaldi, UC, Safari and more — with Android Intents and iOS URL Schemes.

Live demo: https://browser-switcher-demo.jakkimcfly.com
GitHub: https://github.com/jakkimcfly/browser-switcher
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/browser-switcher

Have you ever needed to redirect users from one browser to another? For example, when you want a link to be opened directly in Chrome, Firefox, or another browser instead of the current one?

That’s exactly what my new npm package browser-switcher does. It helps you:

Seamlessly redirect users.
Fully typed (TypeScript).
Detect the current browser.
Supported 10+ browsers.
Detect In-App browser (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok).

In this post, I’ll walk you through the basics of using browser-switcher, give you a working example, and briefly cover its core methods.

🔧 Installation

You can install the package via npm or yarn:

npm install browser-switcher
# or
yarn add browser-switcher

📲 Basic Usage Example

Imagine you want to force open a link in Google Chrome when the user clicks a button:

import BrowserSwitcher from 'browser-switcher';

document.getElementById('open-chrome')?.addEventListener('click', () => {
  try {
    BrowserSwitcher.open({
      targetUrl: 'https://example.com',
      platform: 'auto',
      browser: 'chrome',
    });
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Browser switching failed:', error);
  }
});

👉 On Android, this will use intent:// to launch Chrome.
👉 On iOS, it will use the Chrome URL scheme (googlechrome://).
👉 If the browser is not installed, behavior depends on the browser — some may redirect to Google Play, others may just fail (e.g., DuckDuckGo, Firefox).

Full details are in the README.

📂 Example

You can find a working demo in the example folder of the repository.

🎯 Conclusion

With browser-switcher, you can easily:

Detect the current browser.
Open links in other browsers.
Provide users with a simple UI to choose their browser.

👉 Check it out here: GitHub Repo

✅ That’s it! In just a few lines of code, you can reliably switch users between browsers on both Android and iOS.

DEV Community: Aleksandr Zakharov

🚀 How to Seamlessly Switch Between Browsers in Your Web App with browser-switcher

🔧 Installation

📲 Basic Usage Example

📂 Example

🎯 Conclusion