Open certain domain links from Mac to VMware Fusion Windows

Question

Is there a way to tell Mac OS, VMware Fusion, a third party app, or at least Apple's Mail.app to open certain domains (specified or .local) in my VM over Mac OS?

I have a .NET application on our intranet that requires integrated windows authentication, it's a bit annoying to have to copy and paste each URL from Mail.app, etc to my VM's browser.

Answer 1

Good question! Yes, you can, by installing Choosy.

Your question actually has two parts. First: How do you send some web links to one web browser but other web links to another web browser? OS X decides what application to send a link to based solely on the protocol — the part before the first colon — so for example all http links would be sent to one program (like Safari) while all mailto links go to another program (maybe Mail). When you install Choosy, it becomes the program to which OS X sends all web links — and Choosy can be configured to send different links to different browsers, based on criteria you define. Using Choosy 1.0.3, I had success with the following steps:

1. Open System Preferences and select Choosy.
2. In the General tab, select "Enable Choosy for links". "Start Choosy helper at login" will also activate itself.
3. In the Behaviour tab, select "Use my favorite browser (even if it's not already running)" to match OS X's default behavior, or try one of the other options if you want to explore more of Choosy's functionality.
4. In the Advanced tab, click the "+" button at the bottom left of the window to define a new rule. A sheet will appear.
5. In the "Choosy should use this rule when" section, click the "+" button at the right to add a new criterion, then select "Web address", select "contains", and then type a unique portion of the address of your .NET intranet site into the text box.
6. In the "When this rule is used Choosy should" section, select "Always use this browser", then click the Change button, which will open a file selection window. Leave this window open while you read on.

The second part of your question is: How do you send web links from the Mac to a browser running in your Windows virtual machine in VMware? This is accomplished by using the OS X application icons that VMware creates for you for every Windows application in your virtual machine. In VMware Fusion 3.1.3, I find these application icons inside the virtual machine bundle itself. It looks like in Fusion 4, you can have those icons placed directly into your Mac Applications folder. If you've done that, you should at this point be able to navigate to your Applications folder, select the Internet Explorer icon, click Select, click OK, and be done. If you haven't done that, or are using Fusion 3, then follow these steps:

7. Switch to the Finder and open the folder containing your virtual machine bundle; this is usually the Virtual Machines folder in the Documents folder in your home folder.
8. Control-click or right-click your virtual machine and select "Show Package Contents". A new Finder window should open, containing among other things an Applications folder.
9. Drag this Applications folder into the main area of Choosy's file selection window that you left open earlier. The file selection window should now show the contents of that Applications folder.
10. In the file selection window, select Internet Explorer, then click Select, then click OK.

If you have additional sites you want to send to Internet Explorer, you can repeat the relevant steps above to define additional rules.