Browser Actions is a macOS utility that brings Apple Shortcuts support to your web browser, letting you automate and control Safari, Chrome, and other browsers through keyboard shortcuts, menu bar triggers, and custom automation workflows.
What is Browser Actions?
Browser Actions is a bridge between macOS Shortcuts and your browser — it exposes a rich library of browser-control actions (open tabs, close windows, switch profiles, grab the current URL, inject focus mode, and more) directly inside Apple's Shortcuts app. Where the system Shortcuts library stops at "open a URL," Browser Actions picks up and gives you real programmatic reach into what your browser is doing at any moment.
It lives in the menu bar, stays out of the way, and does its job silently in the background. Most days you forget it's running — right up until you realise you just switched Chrome profiles, grabbed a Markdown-formatted link, and closed every background tab with a single keystroke, and none of that was possible before.
What does Browser Actions do best?
Browser Actions shines as the missing layer between keyboard-driven Mac workflows and the browser, which has historically been a dead zone for Shortcuts power users.
- Tab management at scale: Close all tabs to the right, move a tab to a specific window, or pin the active tab — all scriptable, all triggerable from Raycast, Alfred, or a hotkey.
- URL and title extraction: Pull the current page's URL or title into any Shortcuts chain. Invaluable for read-later flows, Obsidian captures, and share-sheet replacements.
- Profile switching: If you juggle work and personal Chrome (or Arc) profiles, switching programmatically instead of navigating the menu is a genuine quality-of-life upgrade.
- Focus and reading modes: Trigger Reader View or enable distraction-blocking states without lifting your hands from the keyboard.
- Multi-browser support: The action library works across Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave, and Edge — you're not locked into one engine.
The breadth of the action set is what sets it apart. This is not a one-trick tab-closer; it's a composable toolkit that slots neatly into whatever Shortcuts-based system you've already built.
Who should use Browser Actions?
Browser Actions earns its place on machines where the browser is a workhorse, not a casual companion. If you spend the majority of your day in Chrome or Arc and you already reach for Shortcuts, Raycast, or Alfred to control the rest of macOS, the absence of deep browser control has probably frustrated you. Browser Actions is the fix.
Researchers who capture sources constantly, developers who switch between staging and production tabs across multiple profiles, writers who build link-round-up workflows, and anyone who's ever manually hunted for a buried tab across four windows — these are the users who get the most out of it immediately. Casual browser users who open five tabs and call it a day will find it unnecessary.
It pairs especially well with Raycast (which can run Shortcuts directly) and with automation-heavy setups that use Shortcuts as the orchestration layer for the whole Mac.
How much does Browser Actions cost?
Browser Actions is free to download and try, with a paid upgrade unlocking the full action library. The pricing is transparent on the developer's site at actions.work. Given that it plugs a genuine gap that no free alternative covers adequately, the ask is reasonable for anyone who will use it daily.
There are no comparable free alternatives that offer the same depth of Shortcuts-native browser integration. You could approximate some of this with browser extensions like Vimium or with AppleScript hacks, but neither integrates cleanly with modern Apple Shortcuts the way Browser Actions does.
What are the best Browser Actions alternatives?
The honest answer is that Browser Actions occupies a niche with thin competition on macOS. For keyboard-driven tab management alone, Vimium (Chrome/Firefox extension) and Surfingkeys cover a lot of ground without leaving the browser. For launcher-based control, Raycast's built-in browser extension does URL grabbing and basic tab switching — but it stops well short of Browser Actions' Shortcuts depth.
If your goal is purely "open URLs fast," Raycast or Alfred handle that natively. If your goal is to compose browser control into multi-step Shortcuts automations — capturing URLs into Bear, routing research into Notion, or chaining tab cleanup into a focus-mode ritual — Browser Actions has no real peer on the Mac right now. That's a narrow but genuine moat.
How does Browser Actions compare to browser extensions?
Browser extensions live inside the browser sandbox; Browser Actions lives outside it, as a native macOS app. That distinction matters: Browser Actions can be triggered by system-level events (Shortcuts automations, time-of-day triggers, Focus mode changes) and can hand data to any other macOS app in the Shortcuts ecosystem. A browser extension cannot be called from Raycast or wired into a Shortcuts Personal Automation. If you're building a workflow that crosses the browser-to-desktop boundary, Browser Actions is the right tool; if you're staying entirely within the browser, a good extension is lighter and simpler.
