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

August 16, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Aleksandr Zakharov

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).