Currently shipping Macs come without Adobe Flash preinstalled and I’ve been running that same setup without Flash for quite a while now myself. More and more webpages work fine without Flash and only the occasional video requires it. When that is the case, I simply go to the ‘Develop’ menu (enable it in the ‘Advanced’ section of Safari’s preferences if you don’t have it) and select ‘Open Page With’ ➡ ‘Google Chrome.app (20.0.1132.21)’. Since Google Chrome ships with integrated Flash, this is a simple way to switch to a Flash-enabled browser.

Now, rather than having to choose Chrome from the menu it would be nice to be able to assign a keyboard shortcut for this menu item. This is actually quite simple: Open the keyboard preference pane in System Preferences, select ‘Application Shortcuts’ and add a shortcut for the ‘Google Chrome.app (20.0.1132.21)’ menu item to Safari. However, the problem here is that the menu item contains the version number of Chrome and since Chrome updates frequently (and in the background), you’ll find yourself with a broken shortcut very soon.

The fix for this is a little Apple Script OpenURLInNewChromeWindow.app by Mike Hardy which basically tells Google Chrome to open the URL via an Apple Script command. If you run this script once, it will register itself as a application that can handle URLs and will therefore also appear in the list of browsers under ‘Open Page With’. Opening a page with this script will open the current page in Chrome just like before but the point is that the menu command will stay the same no matter what version of Chrome you have installed. Therefore you simply assign the shortcut to this ‘browser’ instead of the ever changing Chrome one.

An added benefit (and actually the reason Mike Hardy wrote the script in the first place) is that the page opens in a new window and not in a new tab (which can be quite annoying when using virtual screens). See Mike’s blog post on more details how to use his script in that context.