guise

Guise is a Windows utility published by jjshanks that enables users to set individual Chrome profiles as the default browser on their system. The software addresses a common organizational challenge faced by people who maintain multiple Chrome profiles, such as separate profiles for work and personal browsing, by routing each clicked link to the appropriate profile based on configurable regular expression rules. When a user clicks a link from another application, guise evaluates the URL against these user-defined regex patterns and opens the link in whichever Chrome profile matches the corresponding rule, ensuring that browsing activity lands in the correct context automatically rather than requiring manual profile selection each time. This makes the software particularly useful for users who want work-related domains to open in a work profile while other links open in a personal profile, or for anyone managing several distinct browsing environments who needs consistent, predictable link handling across the operating system. A notable characteristic of guise is that it requires no administrative rights to install or operate, which lowers the barrier to adoption and makes it suitable for environments where users do not have elevated privileges on their machines, such as managed corporate workstations. The software falls within the browser utilities category, specifically tools focused on default browser management and link routing on Windows. The current version of guise is 0.7.0, and at present only one version is listed in the catalog, indicating a single available release of the software. The version numbering suggests the project remains in an early development stage, prior to a 1.0 milestone release. In summary, guise combines default browser registration, per-profile Chrome targeting, and regex-based URL matching into a lightweight tool designed to streamline multi-profile browsing workflows on Windows without the need for administrative access.

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