Horse – The Organized Browser

[nunodonato]

Funny how these sort of solutions come up. I never understood the tab problem, I don't even use extensions to manage tabs, group tabs, or whatever. I like to keep my work focused, so apart from the 4-5 tabs I keep permanently open due to convenience (email, tasks, calendar, etc), I rarely have more than 3-4 others of stuff I'm working/researching. When its done, I close them. If I need them, I either bookmark or save the content.

[blixt]

My partner has ~300 tabs open at any point in time in Safari for iOS and uses the tab grid as a kind of visual registry of things to read, interesting events/restaurants, in-progress work, etc. It makes me panic looking at it but I think it isn't my place to say that it's a problem.

Basically there's two ways to deal with an emergent user behavior: see it as a problem to control (make people use bookmarks instead), or embrace it as the path of least friction for the user and actually encourage it more, and make it easier, and more robust (Safari sometimes loses all tabs which is obviously a catastrophe for my partner).

Then the remaining question is, can a single product solve both user behaviors? Or do you need a new product to solve for the second behavior? And maybe that's a great reason for a solution like this to come up.

[spinningarrow]

I don’t have a problem != no one has a problem

EDIT: I have no tab management issues either, and my workflow is quite similar to what’s described above. But I’ve seen many people who have different needs.

[vdvsvwvwvwvwv]

Today I used splunk. It can take a while for things to load and more than 1 query is useful so tabs = literal caches. But also tabs = wetware caches, to help remember context. A tab group saves which is useful for projects that spans > 1 day.

[wellthisisgreat]

So the point is to have hierarchical tables groups?

Aren’t there Firefox / Chrome extensions that do that?

I wouldn’t mind paying a lifetime fee for a better browser, that also seems to align with how I take notes. It’s the support of various obscure web gotchas and things like in-browser visualizations that worry me. I run into issues of some page not loading properly on Firefox and have to fire up Chrome, I imagine for a brand new browser that’d be the case even more so

[DecoySalamander]

There is a Tree Style Tab addon for Firefox, but it's nowhere near as polished as what's shown in the promo video. There's nothing like this in Chrome, since Chrome doesn't offer access to any browser UI elements beyond a popup over the extension's icon in the navbar. At one point I even tried to do my version of a vertical/hierarchical tab sidebar that would live in an extra tab in the Dev Tools drawer, but had to give up when I realized that there's no way to keep Dev Tools automatically open on every page.

I think it's a cool idea and something I'd buy for 20-60$, but only if it was an addon, not its own standalone browser. Those are too important to get from a tiny startup.

[joelkoen]

You can achieve the exact same thing in Firefox using the Sidebery extension: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery

[nickthegreek]

I love sidebery but I don’t remember how I originally set it up. I believe I was in some manifest files doing some css tweaks awhile ago. So my biggest issue now is how do I replicate my current bespoke setup on my other systems. Anyone know of any tools to assist?

[sixtyj]

Or this extension called Simple Tab Groups - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

[elashri]

I do work in physics research so I open on average 20-30 arxiv and research papers per any session. This is combined with the usual searches for SO and docs (looking at you CUDA docs) which would be a lot of tabs for any gives session.

I used Firefox developer edition (it was better performance that vanilla Firefox for my m1 mac and this is just a feeling not backed up with any data) and now is using zen browser. It is a huge upgrade, now I have workspaces, split tabs and vertical tabs. All while still using Firefox and ublock origin.

I think this made tabs management good experience but ths most important factor is that I trained myself to really hate having tabs that I don't know which means that once I get past 10 tabs that browser starts to hide some information I got annoyed and then go close some.

But I really feel like zen browser is everything I want in a browser so far. I tried arc which is close but it is chromium based and it is resource monster and also closed source and required account to use.

One other useful thing is that once I got used to use my selfhosted linkding to actually bookmark things I want to explore, this helped with the tendency to use open tabs as things to read later.

[TomK32]

A simple 1L machine with portainer on it and connected by wireguard is what I run my self-hosted stuff at home. Five minutes later I have my own linkding. Thanks for the tip.

[Arech]

Firefox + Simple Tab Groups addon is all you need.

Seriously, a browser is much more than just another program. It has become a foundation of lots of computer interaction experiences, and therefore requirements to it, especially to its security, are super high. I wouldn't expect "professionals" understanding all of this would want to ditch vendors they trust just because they can't keep up with tabs... Never had this problem since I discovered Simple Tab Groups, btw...

[danpalmer]

Interesting that they chose Electron. Cross platform is certainly enticing, but at this point I'd say that browsers are relatively heavyweight pieces of software that require careful optimisation to do well, even assuming you outsource the engine.

[konaraddi]

If true, horse browser devs need to read the Security section on Electron docs:

> With that in mind, be aware that displaying arbitrary content from untrusted sources poses a severe security risk that Electron is not intended to handle.

https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/security#pre...

I feel like they should’ve used Chromium.

[andai]

I think Vivaldi (similar concept, though I haven't tried Horse yet) is also built with Electron. I discovered this because I found it frustratingly slow (the new tab page had a loading spinner!) and found out they made the UI in JavaScript.

It's a shame because I really liked the flexibility (I was a big fan of Opera back in the day), but since new tab is something I do thousands of times per day, that small lag was enough to make it a non-starter.

[kookamamie]

A browser inside a browser inside a browser...

[NetOpWibby]

I bought a lifetime license to Horse a while ago but haven’t really used it until recently (Arc is my main).

It’s pretty good, opinionated, but it doesn’t support extensions. The built-in ad blocker is okay but Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin are my winning combo in mainstream browsers. I also use Raindrop in a regular basis so until Horse at least supports those three extensions, it won’t be my main browser.

[spondyl]

I don't use it myself but I came across this open stats page which seems to suggest Chrome Extension Support is coupled to hitting $10K MRR.

The graph legend says

> To comfortably maintain our own build pipeline with Chrome Extension Support.

[alsetmusic]

> “Why is there no free trial?”

> We introduced a 14-day free trial once, but it introduced a lot of support and admin, while not growing revenue much. It didn’t make a lot of sense and we removed it, but we might try again in the future.

Well, I'm sorry, but in this landscape (browsers everywhere), you need to demonstrate execution and value to me first. Same reason I won't create an account to test drive the Arc Browser. I'm intrigued, but I'm not giving up a damn thing until I know I'm not getting a pile of garbage.

I say this as someone with many paid licenses and subscriptions.

[bachmeier]

They're saying lots of people try the product and they all conclude it's not worth paying for. Not exactly something that makes me reach for the credit card.

[danpalmer]

I agree, I understand the perceived cost of running free trials, but that's just what marketing costs. You can't expect to turn off free trials but retain the same growth. Of course at such a small scale other factors may dominate and they may not notice it holding them back, even if it is.

[hakunin]

I remember reading this jwz post[1] in 2012 where he said he never uses tabs at all, and realizing that I can use a combination of windows and tabs. So now I just have each window contain a bunch of tabs for one topic. If it's WIP, the window stays open or minimized, if it's a long term thing, I convert it to Safari's tab group. Not sure why more people don't use multiple windows, it's way more convenient than just having hundreds of tabs in one window.

[1]: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of...

[skulk]

> The point here is, you cannot turn off Tabs in Firefox. You may think that you can, but history proves you wrong. I spent literally years where, each time I upgraded Firefox, I had to spend half an hour searching through the thousands of lines of about:config looking for the newly-added checkbox that I need to un-check -- and then it would only work like 60% of the time anyway, and I'd still end up with tabs.

I ran into this problem and came up with a jank solution: https://github.com/sid-code/tabs-are-windows

It's about 5 lines of code and punts all new tabs into their own windows. I've been using it for a while now and it works, except when you press C-t (my muscle memory for opening new tabs) it doesn't focus the new window's address bar due to the rigamarole of pushing it off into a new window.

[andai]

Has anyone used both Vivaldi and Horse? iirc vertical tabs (with nesting) were one of the main selling points for Vivaldi.

So my natural question when seeing Horse is "how much of this does Vivaldi do” (for free)?

[n3storm]

I have used for several extended periods of time Min browser to stay focused on docs and spaces:

https://minbrowser.org/

[wonger_]

I like Min too. I've been using it for 3 years. The workspace separation is nice, along with the minimal UI. I think it has the best defaults of any browser. Unfortunately, there's a couple uncomfortable quirks and bugs to deal with. I'll probably be switching to Firefox soon and spending lots of time customizing.

[precompute]

Okay, so pay money to someone to maintain a Chrome fork with a somehow-better treestyletabs? No thank you. This is a ridiculous product that caters to people that can't install a simple browser extension. This is also a huge security risk.

Install firefox, use an extension. Or use brave and its built-in sidebar for tabs.

[quyleanh]

Why don’t we just use Edge? It offers a superior experience with features like vertical tabs, collections, and more.

[GoblinSlayer]

Too much nagging.

[timeon]

Why this chromium flavor in particular? You can have these with Firefox and even Safari has it by default.

[vdvsvwvwvwvwv]

Why not am extension instead? The little animated gif of it looks like it is cool. Not sure I care as Chromes groups solve 80% of this for me. For anything deeper I use Confluence to manage info (Google docs and Notion as well)

[ax0ar]

Looks like an Arc alternative, but how trustable is this? I read some comments here mentioning how electron is not very safe. Besides, it's a one man project. Can a browser be a one man business?

[nopelynopington]

I was full of excitement for this when I saw it, until I realised it was a paid product. $60 is a lot to pay for a niche browser. I'm sure someone has built an extension to do this in Firefox or WebKit already

[devit]

I like the way it works, and I'm experimenting with customizing Firefox to behave like browser.horse.

Currently I did this, which seems to completely mimic what they show in the video:

1. Install Tree Style Tabs. This will give you hierarchical tabs in the sidebar

2. Install Simple Tab Groups. This will let you create multiple separate "tab groups" (aka workspaces) with different sets of tabs.

3. Go to Settings, turn on "Open previous tabs and windows" in General/Startup. This will make Firefox reload your tabs on startup

4. In about:config set browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory to true. This will make the browser auto-unload unused tabs so you can have unlimited tabs without running out of memory.

5. In about:config set browser.search.openintab to true. This will make the search bar open search results in a new tab

6. In Tree Style Tabs config set "Promote All Children to parent level always". This will make closing intermediate tabs in the tree work properly (remove the intermediate and reparent all children to the intermediate parent).

7. Install Tampermonkey and add the userscript at the bottom. This will remap click to open a new foreground tab (i.e. original ctrl+shift+click), shift+click to navigate in the current page (i.e. original click) and ctrl+shift+click or shift+middle click to open in a new window (i.e. original shift+click).

Note that the extensions require privileges to access data on all sites, so make sure you trust them or do this on a separate profile or VM.

Compared to browser.horse, this is free and customizable, but might be less optimized, perhaps less featureful and won't automatically get any new feature the browser.horse developers invent.

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name         Click opens in new foreground tab
    // @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
    // @version      2024-11-12
    // @description  Click opens in new foreground tab
    // @author       You
    // @match        *://*/\*
    // @grant        none
    // ==/UserScript==

    (function() {
    'use strict';

    function generateRandomId(length) {
        const characters = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789';
        let result = '';
        for (let i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            result += characters.charAt(Math.floor(Math.random() * characters.length));
        }
        return result;
    }

    const eventProp = "customClick_" + generateRandomId(32);

    function customClickHandler(event) {
        if (event[eventProp]) {
            //console.log("customClick: recursion " + event);
            return;
        } else {
            //console.log("customClick: first " + event);
        }
        const ctrl = event.button === 1 || (event.ctrlKey && event.button === 0);
        const shift = event.shiftKey;

        let newCtrl = undefined;
        let newShift = undefined;

        //console.log("customClick: detected with " + ctrl + " " + shift);
        if (shift && !ctrl) {
            newCtrl = false;
            newShift = false;
        } else if (shift && ctrl) {
            newCtrl = false;
            newShift = true;
        } else if (!shift && !ctrl) {
            newCtrl = true;
            newShift = true;
        } else { // !shift && ctrl
            return;
        }
        //console.log("customClick: dispatching " + newCtrl + " " + newShift);
        const options = {};
        let source = event;
        while(source) {
            for (const prop of Object.getOwnPropertyNames(source)) {
                options[prop] = event[prop];
            }
            source = Object.getPrototypeOf(source);
        }
        options.button = 0;
        options.ctrlKey = newCtrl;
        options.shiftKey = newShift;

        let newEvent = new PointerEvent('click', options);
        newEvent[eventProp] = true;

        event.preventDefault();
        event.stopPropagation();
        event.target.dispatchEvent(newEvent);
    }
    document.addEventListener('click', customClickHandler, true);
    document.addEventListener('auxclick', customClickHandler, true);
    })();

[talldayo]

> Save up to 2 hours every day by organizing your work seamlessly and reducing daily stress.

Aaaaaaaand into the bullshit box it goes.

[emptiestplace]

You know you don't have time for this, get back to organizing your tabs!

[kookamamie]

Could have been a browser extension, no?

[deafpolygon]

Not quite as easy to monetize.