Horse Browser
The research browser Eleanor and I built because we wanted to use it. Not another browser with a fresh coat of paint. It actually changes how navigation works.
What it is
Horse Browser is a research browser built around the Trails® system. Instead of "address bar, back button, and tabs," you get 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 line, from one of our riders, basically describes the whole product. Trails externalizes the browsing context that neurotypical brains hold inside their heads. If working memory and executive function are not your strong suit, seeing the trail is more than helpful. It is calming.
You can chase a tangent without panicking, because the way back is right there. No more frantic back-button mashing.
The hard part, the part nobody notices, is making this work on almost every website on the internet. Good design is invisible, so a multi-year engineering bender disappears into "oh that's nice."
What I built
The Trails® System
A genuinely new way to navigate a browser. A visual tree of your session. Not Tree Style Tabs in a purple jacket. Tree Style Tabs is excellent, by the way. Different instrument.
Works on the Whole Internet
Got Trails to behave on almost every website ever made, edge cases included. This is the part that took years.
Calm by Default
Every interaction tuned to lower the anxiety floor. Browsing should feel like a deep breath, not a stress test.
Native on macOS, Windows, Linux
A proper native app on all three. No web wrapper, no excuses. It feels like part of your computer.
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 funny. For most people Horse is a curiosity: novel, doesn't click with their workflow. For ADHD riders, it's a near-maniacal love. One of them recently said they'd pay our entire MRR by themselves, that's how much it 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.
So the homepage now says what it is. Horse 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
The best products come from scratching your own itch. Eleanor and I didn't set out to build a browser for ADHD. We built one that worked for us, and it turned out that was the same thing.
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. They just wanted to chat with me because I'm such incredible fun to talk to. (I get it. I'm really amazing.)
Making a brand new navigation system work with the entire web is a giant engineering problem. The bigger problem was letting the product actually be for people like me, and saying so on the homepage.
Hiding what something is doesn't make it better. Saying what Horse is, plainly, made every conversation since then better and the roadmap clearer.