Hello Riders,
Horse won two places in Product Hunt’s 2024 Golden Kitty Awards.
Pascal Pixel was named Maker of the Year. Horse took second place in Bootstrapped & Small Teams.
We checked several times. The golden cat remained.
A browser is an unreasonable indie product
When Pascal started making Horse, other founders offered the conventional advice: do not build a browser. Build something smaller. A browser has a colossal compatibility surface, years of expected features, and users who reasonably become alarmed when the software containing their entire working day behaves strangely.
All true.
The trouble was that the problem lived at browser scale. Tabs preserve pages but erase the route between them. An extension could decorate that arrangement; it could not replace the arrangement completely.
So Horse did the unreasonable thing. It replaced tabs with Trails®. The Trails guide shows how a new page keeps its place beneath the page that opened it. Keep going and the whole route remains visible. Get interrupted and the task still has a path home.
That idea needed a browser around it. We had already checked.
The golden cat arrives
Product Hunt’s awards are nominated and voted on by its audience. Horse reached the final group in Bootstrapped & Small Teams. Pascal appeared in the Maker of the Year category. Riders, fellow makers, and people who had only just discovered the browser turned up for both.
Then Product Hunt announced the results: silver for Horse, first place for Pascal.
This produced the normal sequence of founder emotions:
- Delight.
- Suspicion that we had read the page incorrectly.
- Opening the page on another device.
- Delight, now with independent replication.
The trophy went beside a Game Boy and a cup of coffee, where all serious technology awards naturally belong.
What the award recognised
Excellent browsers already fit many people, which is a lovely outcome for them. Horse does an additional job for people who need the route through their work to remain visible.
The award recognised that a tiny independent browser could challenge an inherited interface and make the alternative real. Horse was not a concept video about the future of browsing. Riders could download it, click a link, and watch the future branch beneath the current page with their own eyes.
That is the part worth celebrating at maximum volume. The browser interface is not a law of nature! We are allowed to question it. We are allowed to build the answer. We are allowed, apparently, to receive a golden cat for our trouble.
Pascal later held a live Product Hunt AMA about making Horse and building independently.
Thank you to everyone who voted, shared the launch, or took a chance on the strange browser without tabs. The recognition belongs to a product made possible by Riders who were willing to try a different path.
The golden cat remains vigilant.
Catch you on the Trail,
Pascal & Eleanor