Put your favorite websites in your Mac’s menu bar

Suffering from tab overload? If your browsing habits have you opening too many tabs during the course of a day, you can offload some to Air Browser, a Mac app that lets you access up to seven websites from the menu bar.

When you launch Air Browser, it puts an icon in your menu bar. When adding a site, you can give it a title and check a box to have the site reload each time you open it. You can add up to seven sites; each site gets a button at the top of the Air Browser window that shows the title you gave it. Click each button to jump from site to site within Air Browser. There is also a button in the upper-right corner that lets you set the dimensions for each site so that it fits in the Air Browser window.

In theory, the app would be a great way to access Facebook and Twitter and any other sites you check in with throughout the day. In practice, however, Air Browser is a bit buggy and a memory hog.

I had trouble initially when setting the titles for my sites; they weren’t saved on the first try. More trouble occurred when I choose the maximum horizontal and vertical dimensions for a site. When I opened the site, the Air Browser window lost its navigation buttons and wouldn’t let me switch to another site, access its preferences or even close the app. Thankfully, it’s easy to force quit a menu bar app.

When I opened Activity Monitor to quit Air Browser, I discovered that it was by far using the most system resources of any of my open apps. So, maybe having a few extra tabs open in your Web browser of choice is the lesser of two evils here.

For what it’s worth, Air Browser is discounted to $1.99 for the rest of today as part of Two Dollar Tuesday before it returns to its usual $4.99 price, which is £3.99 in the UK and AU$6.49 in Australia.