Help Extend Horse

The Campaign

The goal was never a Horse feature. Extensions could have been bolted on privately, and there is precedent: Brave started as an Electron app and forked Electron into ‘Muon’ to get them, then carried that fork themselves for years. One person cannot carry a fork of Electron. More to the point, a fork helps exactly one browser.

So the ask was public and small. Go to the pull request. Upvote it. Say you want it. That was the entire thing this page asked of anyone who read it, and it was the only thing that would work, because what the change needed was not another volunteer writing code. It needed evidence that people wanted it.

Enough of you did it that within three days it was the most upvoted pull request in Electron’s history. Pieter Levels put it in front of an audience many times the size of this site’s. Sam Maddock had written the pull request and the packages underneath it, and kept at it while the votes came in. The core team saw the demand, and it merged.

That is the part worth keeping a page about. Electron carries something like 184 million users across apps like Slack and Discord, and every one of those apps can host extensions now. Anyone building a browser for a school, a newsroom, or one stubborn job no longer has to choose between the extension library and a fork they cannot maintain. Horse got what it needed by asking for something bigger than itself.

Closer to home, the person who asked most plainly was a customer. Max Roberts, in an interview on this site in 2024, back when he could only ask:

“I do desperately want integration with third-party password managers, specifically 1Password. The Saddlepack is a great feature/idea, but when you have years of passwords in another manager, you don’t want to leave them behind.”

Max Roberts, podcaster

The Timeline