This article originally appeared on the Desk Investor blog on 8th January 2024.
The best browser for research – I used Horse browser by @PascalPixel for a month and here’s my experience of this trail-blazing browser.
A little bit of context first:
– I have been a software engineer for more than 12 years now.
– I became a public listed stocks investor 4 years ago.
▶️ So it’s been a long minute since I have been living in tab hell.
As I navigate through equities and assets, the latest corporate announcements, track the market with fundamental scores and numbers, explore my watchlist, I often find myself in a position where tabs look like meaningless pixels.
Here’s a quick example of that:
Enter Horse browser 🐎
▶️ The numero uno feature of horse is that it replaces tabs with trails of organized/sequential browsing.
Lets say I open a stock screener of my choice as trail. Any link I open consecutively with clicks on that trail will continue to launch sub trails as child nodes of that trail. Automatically organizing a sequential trail from
Start -> Finish
While giving you an organised path of your specific topic of research.
It is also smart enough to open a sub trail of existing child nodes (trails) so that if you are browsing in between 2 subtrails it gives you clear demarcation of which list item you’ve opened.
Crazy? Absolutely. Awesome? Absolutely.
Here’s a quick example with 2 different watchlists/screens:
1. Growth without dilution
2. Piotroski Scan
They were two sibling trails but opening an equity from either of those watchlist will create their own brand new trails:
Organizing your research from start to finish does wonders as you can essentially watch items through them as if you’re seeking video in a video player seek-bar. This is what made me call it the best browser for research.
💯 I’ve made a list of things I absolutely loved about the browser:
▶️ I make organized folders of the creators whose content I enjoy and will continue to keep adding sub trails of their new content. As and when I need to refer to previous topics/learnings from them I can quickly seek through their releases and voila, there I have it. Saves me a ton of time 🙂 You may have seen a few of them in my screenshots
▶️ When I am debugging web-apps, I can still use a stable dev tool and have necessary library documentation of that certain app in the same folder with sibling trails.
▶️ The browser even with so many trails opened is not a RAM/memory eater as most of the other browsers tend to do.
▶️ I have not clicked a “back” button in a long while now during my research. It’s never really a single back button while researching, it always ends up being a blizzard of back quests <- <- <- to finally get to the last sane link where I have to diverge from again.
This feature alone, for me is reason enough to migrate all research to horse.
▶️ Dark reader as a default feature which auto inverts all the light websites to make them dark.
👨🏻💼Things I’d like to see improving:
▶️ The first thing that I’d love to see at the earliest is auto page translations. Currently when I am reading web pages in foreign languages I can’t really directly translate it to English. This is a bummer, eagerly awaiting an upgrade for this.
▶️ Some shortcuts are tricky or I probably haven’t figured it out yet. When I am in a child trail n-level down, and I instinctively press cmd+t it starts a brand new base-root level trail. cmd+n takes me to that trails top level and creates a trail there.
▶️ I definitely miss some of the chrome plugins in this.
▶️ Need to be able to open multiple windows of the horse and screen-share. (I believe they already have it on their pipeline so I am not super worried about that)
I have been to their discord page and they’re pretty active, with swift responses for any questions I have had so far, so I believe improvements must be on their way.
With all that being said, just want to thank Pascal and the browser horse team for coming up with something that’s a breath of fresh air, and need of the hour for the online research world.
Download the browser from here.
