Hello Riders,
2023 was Horse Browser’s first full year out of the gate.
Other founders kept asking why we were building a browser. The sensible advice was to make a small product with a narrow feature list, finish it, and enjoy the warm administrative glow of a normal business decision.
They were correct about the amount of work. We continued anyway.
Why a whole browser?
Tabs were not a loose screw we could tighten with one more extension. The browser kept destroying the relationship between pages. A link opened, the previous page disappeared behind it, and the person doing the work was expected to remember the route.
Horse replaced that arrangement with Trails. Every page branches from the page that opened it. The route remains in the sidebar. That meant changing the most ordinary behaviour in the piece of software people use all day, then making the result feel ordinary enough to trust.
So yes, a whole browser.
The Riders who accepted the rough edges
The first version asked a lot from its early Riders. Horse had one window. Third-party password-manager extensions did not work. Features people expected from any grown browser were still written on our whiteboard in a threatening amount of ink.
People subscribed anyway. They saw what Trails could become and gave us time to build the creature comforts around them.
One Rider, programmer @halloleo, told us Horse was “so much better implemented than all the extensions for Firefox or Chrome.” That sentence made me absurdly happy. We were not trying to attach a tree to tabs. We were making the tree the navigation model, all the way down.
The rough edges were real too. In September we broke the updater, an impressive mistake for software whose updates are how mistakes get fixed. Riders reported it, we repaired it, and the browser emerged with its dignity mostly reattached.
A place in the toolchest
Horse finished the year in David Nichols’ 2023 Scribbled Line Toolchest, alongside independent tools we admired.
That recognition felt enormous. A browser made in a small apartment had travelled far enough for someone outside it to say: this belongs in the box with the good tools.
I am choosing to interpret “toolchest” literally. Horse was now a serious implement. Possibly a plane. Definitely one of the heavier objects near the bottom.
What changed afterwards
The limitations in this story belong to 2023, not the Horse you can download today.
Multiple windows arrived with Horse 3.0. Tested 1Password and Bitwarden extensions now run in Horse, and the built-in Saddlepack password manager remains available for a local vault. The list of changes kept growing because the original arrangement worked: Riders paid for the browser, and the browser used that time to become better.
That is the durable first-year story. We picked a problem large enough to be embarrassing, built the first real version, broke the updater once, and reached the end of the year with more conviction than we started it.
A browser can remember the path through your work. Two people can build one. The impossible category was getting terribly crowded.
Catch you on the Trail,
Pascal & Eleanor