We are Pascal and Eleanor, a couple in Lisbon building Horse Browser from our home offices while eating the correct amount of pastéis de nata, which is several.
Horse began with two people doing completely different work and meeting the same broken bit of technology.
Eleanor worked in photo research, searching archives, cross-referencing sources, and keeping hundreds of pages open for one project. Every promising image led to three more searches. The branching was the work, but her browser displayed it as a pile.
I have ADHD. Every useful link could carry me somewhere interesting, then an interruption could erase the task I had actually opened the browser to finish. The tab was still somewhere in the pile, technically. This is a standard computers-have-failed-to-help-us technicality.
We could have become extremely disciplined custodians of tiny rectangles. Instead, I rebuilt the browser.
Horse replaces tabs with Trails. Click a link and it branches beneath the page you came from. Collapse a project, open another, then come back tomorrow with the whole path waiting. Your brain no longer has to hold the structure together because the computer has accepted this job at last. Computers love jobs!
How We Got Here
I dropped out of high school, taught myself to code and design, then spent years making products for other people. By my early twenties I was building homepages for Silicon Valley startups, and my last job was Head of UX at ZeroDown¹. It was good work with good people, but I wanted to build the thing I could already see.
Eleanor studied history at Oxford, then worked with photo libraries across Europe². Her projects crossed archives, museums, magazines, client requests, and hundreds of open pages. She did not need a lecture about tab hygiene. She needed the structure of the work to remain visible.
We met in Lisbon in 2021. In 2022, I left my job and started building Horse full-time. Two years later, Horse won Product Hunt’s Maker of the Year³. Eleanor now runs community and marketing while I handle design and engineering, and we still build the whole thing from home.
The Future Is Allowed to Work Better
The internet is magnificent. It contains nearly every idea, person, archive, recipe, argument, cat, and badly named PDF you could hope to find. The browser should help you move through that abundance without demanding a perfect working memory as the entrance fee.
That is especially important for ADHD minds. Horse does not fix ADHD, because ADHD is not a software defect. It externalizes the executive function that ordinary browsers demand: the path stays on screen, the task survives the interruption, and you can re-enter without reconstructing yesterday from a row of favicons.
Horse started in a one-bedroom flat, with me coding in the bedroom and Eleanor working at the dining table. Now it is our full-time job, we have proper home offices, and people use this strange little browser to finish real things every day. We remain delighted by this!
There is plenty left to build. Good. We love building it.
Notes & references
- ZeroDown was a Silicon Valley fintech startup where I worked remotely from Lisbon.⤴
- Photo-library work crosses image archives, publishers, magazines, museums, and client requirements. Each useful result creates new searches, which is exactly why its structure matters.⤴
- Product Hunt named Pascal Pixel Maker of the Year in 2024. The prize was a golden cat trophy, as all serious browser engineering prizes should be.⤴
