Feeling the pressure? You've got 48 hours to finish your next college paper, and your mind's a chaotic jumble of thoughts and ideas. And what’s making it worse? Your browser's a hot mess too. Hundreds of open tabs, messy downloads, and forgotten bookmarks.
That’s why you need a browser will keep you on track and make researching as productive and chill as possible.
So, as academic researchers and designers of our own browser, we’ve compiled a list of the very best browsers to get your assignments done.
What is a browser for school work?
We all grew up on Google Chrome but these days there are many more web browsers available, which offer super cool features for studying at college. Browsers for school work are browsers designed to help you organise your references, track your thesis research, compare data, and help you with your note taking.
Why you need to use the right browser for school work
The internet is an amazing resource for anyone studying in college. Resources, like Jstor, ResearchGate, WorldCat and Elsevier, and world-class library archives are always available just a click away. Plus search engine tools like Google Scholar, Science.gov, and BASE, all provide easy access to hundreds of millions of university papers.
But, that said, the internet is also an incredibly distracting place, filled with social stuff and annoying ads, that can impact your studying. Browsers that are focused on minimising distractions will help you keep your focus and get your school work done.
Keeping track of your research, saving relevant pages and managing your references is key when you’re writing an essay. It’s all-too-easy to end up with messy tabs, feeling overwhelmed and not sure where you are, especially if you’re juggling multiple papers. That’s why you need a browser designed with college in mind.
Best browsers for school work
Now you understand the importance of choosing the right browser for your school work, let’s discuss the best options out there. After careful review, here is our list.
Horse Browser
In our opinion, Horse Browser beats the rest of the browsers on this list, hands down. OK, maybe we’re a bit biased, but here’s why Horse Browser is the best browser for school work.
The other browsers we’re recommending all offer ways to organise & group your tabs and, while this is welcome & useful, it doesn’t really solve the problem you face when you’re overwhelmed by your research reading. Because grouped tabs are still easily cluttered-up or forgotten, just like bookmarks.
So let’s see what makes Horse Browser so different…
KEY SCHOOL WORK FEATURES
- Unique Trails Feature: This feature marks out Horse Browser as our go-to school work browser. Horse Browser replaces tabs with its own navigation system, called Trails. Every time you click on a link, Horse Browser opens a new page on the Trail, creating a list of nested pages in one easy-to-read vertical layout. Trails become your tabs, bookmarks and history in one. You can see exactly how you reached a particular page, allowing you to keep track of your research rabbit holes and make cool connections along the way. You can also drag-and-drop, rename, delete and customise your Trails to create your own filing system for papers you want to reference later.
- Autosaves Your Pages: One of our favourite features. Horse Browser autosaves your pages, just like a Notes App. Everything you need is still there, whenever you re-open your browser, even after an update or shut down. So you will never lose your Tabs again!
- In-built Notes: Horse Browser offers an in-built Notes tool, where you can jot down handy notes or paste relevant quotations.
- Focus-friendly Design: Horse Browser has a collapsible sidebar. So if you’re doing deep-focus work, like reading a long research paper, you can collapse the sidebar and give yourself distraction-free screentime. Horse also offers an extremely effective in-built Ad-Blocker (no more YouTube ads!) and Dark Reader, which helps you keep your focus and rest tired eyes, while you’re studying.
- Search Features: Horse Browser supports a wide range of search engines. It also provides a handy Find in Page tool, which can be used across different pages. This is an extremely useful tool when you need to compare data across different sources.
- Super cute: OK, so it’s not technically that important for school work but Horse Browser allows you to customise your pages and Trails with emojis and icons so your browser looks extra pretty. It’s also a nice way to categorise your pages.
Pricing: $99 one-off lifetime. This is the only paid-for browser on the list. But we genuinely think the cost is worth it for Horse’s unique Trails feature and life-time access.
Being a user-supported business, Horse Browser doesn’t collect or sell users’ telemetry data. And we believe we need more user-funded models, like this.
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft’s browser, Edge, has some useful features for academics, as well as some new AI tools, and we’ve rounded up our choice of its top tools for you here.
KEY SCHOOL WORK FEATURES
- Collections: Microsoft Edge’s Collections feature allows you to save webpages by dragging and dropping tabs into a Collection. Your tabs appear in a list with thumbnails for quick, easy reference. Collections can be accessed and shared anytime and include a useful notes feature. That said, Collections can quickly fall prey to the very same issue as Bookmarks. They’re easily lost, cluttered up and forgotten.
- Immersive Reader: The Immersive Reader feature allows users to view a distraction-free version of online text and has a ‘read aloud’ function, with audio reading of the page. You can also alter the text to your preference.
- AI tools: Edge offers an AI chatbot in its sidebar, known as Co-pilot, which can help you automatically create essay citations.
- PDF Reader: Edge’s PDF Reader allows you to highlight and make notes directly into PDFs, which comes in handy when reviewing academic papers.
Pricing: Free but, unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Despite some unique security features, Microsoft Edge has received criticism due to data collection, privacy concerns and even for injecting ads into users’ desktop operating systems.
Vivaldi
Known as the most customisable browser out there, Vivaldi can be fine-tuned to suit you. That said, customisation takes time and can also end up in a distracted user experience.
KEY SCHOOL WORK FEATURES
- Customisable tab organization: Designed to be one of the most customisable browsers out there, Vivaldi’s tab management tools are aligned with this approach. Tab stacking allows users to create groups of tabs in two-level stacks, while tab tiling gives a splitscreen view. And users can choose between vertical, accordion or compact mode to view their tabs. While Vivaldi’s customisation makes it easy to personalise your organisation, we also see potential for things to get pretty cluttered, pretty quickly!
- In-built notes: Vivaldi has in-built notes, including a new ‘append to note’ tool, which allows you to highlight specific text and add it to a pre-existing note. Notes can be synced across devices.
- Reader View: Like Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi offers a distraction-free Reader, which removes ads and other visual clutter when reading an online article.
Pricing: Free… But, again, there’s no free lunch here… While Vivaldi doesn’t track its users or sell data to the same extent as some other browsers, it does earn revenue through search engine and bookmark partnerships.
Brave
We’re giving a brief mention to Brave Browser. Honestly, Brave is more orientated towards the Web 3 crowd and doesn’t have a ton of features that are useful for college work but we’ll describe a couple of features that might be useful to you.
KEY SCHOOL WORK FEATURES
- Vertical tab organization: Brave’s Vertical Tab Organisation is nicely-designed. Again, this is just a tab organiser so it doesn’t really solve the deeper issues with tabs that we outlined but it is sleek and minimal.
- Ad blocker: Brave offers a great powerful native ad blocker to help you block ads.
Pricing: Free… Brave is known for being a private browser that doesn’t collect users’ data, unless you’ve switched on Rewards or Sync. However, the company does make money from the sale of new tab takeovers and also Brave Ads that users opt into.
So what makes a good browser for school work?
When choosing a browser for school work, there are various things to consider. We hope this list has helped you decide which browser to choose.
We would recommend Horse Browser for deep-diving online and organising your research, thanks to its unique Trails feature. And, as a bonus, it also values your privacy.
In conclusion
For school work, you need a browser that is focused on helping you to study and search effectively. It needs to help you organise your references, track research, compare data and assist your note taking. Choosing the right browser can make a huge difference to your productivity in college.
To try out Horse Browser, check out more information here.
