Horse Browser
Eleanor and I built the browser our brains were asking for. Horse replaces tab chaos with Trails®, a visual map of where you went and how you got there.
What it is
Horse Browser is built around Trails®. Instead of asking an address bar, a back button and 47 tabs to impersonate a memory, it shows you a visual tree of everywhere you’ve been and how you got there.
You know the bit where you have 47 tabs open and no clue how you got to any of them? Or you go down one tasty little rabbit hole and can’t find your way back to whatever you were supposed to be doing? That.
“Horse Browser works like my brain does. I can go off on a tangent, and when I come back, I know exactly what I was doing before.”
That rider described the whole machine. Trails externalizes the context your brain was apparently expected to hold by itself. The path stays on the screen, so you can spend your working memory on the work. Computers love jobs!
Chase the tangent. The way back is right there, patiently waiting for your triumphant return.
Making that feel obvious took years because Trails has to behave on almost every website ever made. A multi-year engineering bender now disappears into “oh, that’s nice.”
What I built
The Trails® System
Tree Style Tabs is excellent at showing relationships between open tabs. Horse makes that tree the complete, persistent navigation model: open pages, history and saved context all live together in Trails.
Works on the Whole Internet
Trails behaves on almost every website ever made, including determined little edge cases that took years to domesticate.
Calm by Default
Every interaction lowers the anxiety floor. Browsing should feel like a deep breath, not an exam you forgot to study for.
Native on macOS, Windows, Linux
One proper desktop app on all three. Your operating system may choose a kingdom; Horse remains diplomatic.
Current Status
Horse is my main thing now. The next milestone is $10k MRR, at which point I get to do this full-time and stop taking freelance gigs to fund it.
The response is wonderfully lopsided: most people find Horse interesting, while ADHD riders fall in near-maniacal love. One recently offered to pay our entire MRR alone because Horse helps them run their company.
It took a while to admit out loud that the people loving Horse were ADHD people. Eleanor and I built it for ourselves; two years of conversations made the pattern impossible to ignore. Daniel, a psychotherapist who also rides Horse, said one sentence in plain terms: “Horse externalizes executive functioning. That’s why it works for ADHD brains.” That cracked it open. I went and read Barkley.
Horse now says what it is: the browser for special little boys and girls like me who want to get their special little life together. You’re welcome to try your fun little things instead.
What I learned
Eleanor and I didn’t set out to build a browser for ADHD. We built one that worked for us, then listened when the people who loved it told us who “us” was.
Talk to your actual users, not the ones who talk to you. When I started logging usage, half my most vocal “fans” barely opened the app. The most dedicated riders were people I had never spoken to. Reality had quietly assembled a better focus group.
Making a new navigation system work with the entire web is a giant engineering problem. Saying exactly who it was for took longer than it should have.
Once Horse said “ADHD” plainly, the product, the riders and the next thing to build all snapped into focus.