Multi-profile Chrome across macOS Spaces: URL opens in the correct profile, but focus goes to the wrong window #550

Setup

• Finicky 4.4.0-alpha, macOS 15 (Darwin 24.6), Google Chrome with two profiles
• Each profile has its window on its own macOS Space (personal on desktop 2, work on desktop 4); links are usually clicked from a third app on yet another Space (desktop 3)
• Handlers use profiles:

{
  match: ["substack.com/*", "*.substack.com/*"],
  browser: { name: "Google Chrome", profile: "Business" },
}

Problem

The URL always opens as a tab in the correct profile's window — routing works great. But focus doesn't follow the tab. Finicky launches via open -a "Google Chrome" …, which activates Chrome at the app level; macOS then fronts whichever Chrome window lives on the current Space (or the last-used one) — usually the other profile. The user has to hunt across Spaces for the tab that just opened.

Workaround that works (and what it taught us)

I replaced Chrome in the handler with a small AppleScript applet that:

1. snapshots id of active tab of every window in Chrome,
2. runs open -na "Google Chrome" --args --profile-directory=… <url>,
3. polls until one window's active tab id changes (or a new window appears) — that's the window that received the tab,
4. set index of theWin to 1, then via System Events: perform action "AXRaise" of window 1 + set frontmost to true.

This reliably pulls focus across Spaces to the right window. Two pitfalls that cost me iterations, in case they help an implementation:

• Matching the target window by title fails — the new tab often still reports "Untitled" while loading.
• Detecting the change by active-tab URL fails when the same URL is opened twice; tab ids are the reliable signal.

Residual cosmetic quirk of the workaround: the app-level activation still flashes the wrong window for ~a second before AXRaise lands. A native implementation could likely avoid that by raising before/while activating.

Suggestion

An opt-in per-handler flag, e.g. focusWindow: true, that makes the launcher raise the specific window that received the tab when a profile is set. Happy to test a build — and thanks for Finicky, it removed real daily friction for me.