Hello Riders,
In December 2024, third-party password managers were still coming to Horse.
Horse already had Saddlepack, its built-in local password manager. Saddlepack is excellent if you want a vault that stays on the machine. It is less excellent if your existing life is already inside 1Password or Bitwarden and contains fourteen years of credentials, emergency codes, and the login for a router last seen in 2017.
People did not want a second password life. Entirely reasonable.
The obstacle underneath Horse
Horse is a complete browser, but some of its foundations are shared with other desktop apps. At the time, that foundation could not run the class of browser extension used by third-party password managers.
This meant the missing capability could not be solved with a cheery button and a heroic afternoon. The shared foundation had to learn how these extensions work first. Then Horse could build on top of it.
Sam Maddock, an open-source maintainer, wrote the upstream work.
Pascal shared the proposal with Riders. People showed up, explained why the capability mattered, and pushed it to become the most-upvoted pull request in Electron’s history. The core maintainers noticed. The work was merged.
Please pause here to enjoy the scale of that outcome.
A small browser had encountered a missing piece of infrastructure. One person built the piece properly. Riders made its importance visible. The shared project accepted it. Now every compatible desktop app could inherit a better foundation.
THE COMPUTER GOT A NEW ORGAN. EVERYBODY REMAIN CALM.
What “merged” meant
The merge did not instantly pour the Chrome Web Store into Horse. It created the machinery. Horse still had to choose extensions, test them against Trails, build an installation surface, and keep the supported set working across releases.
That distinction matters because browser extensions were built around browsers made of tabs. Horse is made of Trails. An extension that assumes one page equals one tab can become extremely philosophical when presented with a branching tree.
The work continued.
What runs now
The future tense has reached its destination. Horse 3.3 ships tested extension support on Stable, including 1Password and Bitwarden. Horse also supports uBlock Origin Lite and Dark Reader.
Saddlepack remains. It offers a local vault without cloud sync. The extensions offer access to the password systems people already use across devices. Different jobs, both legitimate, no ceremonial battle between them.
The extensions page carries the current supported list and installation instructions. The rest of this story is the magnificent route by which that list became possible.
Open-source software is often described as infrastructure, which makes it sound like grey pipes under a civic building. Sometimes it is also a tiny browser, a determined maintainer, and a crowd of people leaning on the same impossible door until it becomes a doorway.
More of this, please.
Catch you on the Trail,
Pascal & Eleanor