Experimenting with the Horse

Let's get a bit philosophical

Recently, I've been looking for the web browsers with a clear monetization model where the user would not be a product. I mean monetization via paid subscription instead of being "free".

Why would I do that? Well, there is a saying: "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Somebody is always paying, and the question with web browsers is: who is paying for the browser development if you're using the product for free?

People got used to the thought that a web browser is something free. But who is paying for the development of those "free" web browsers? Obviously, the companies that monetize through advertising. They want to track your browsing habits and interests to sell you something more efficiently by showing you the most relevant ads.

It's actually helpful to see something relevant when I'm searching for something. But what if I want the systems to do that only when I am in an active research mode, rather than tracking my behaviour all the time? What if I want some online privacy for the casual internet usage?

Web browser development company still has to make money somehow to stay alive and thrive and provide excellent service. But I don't want it to monetize me by showing me ads without my permission or tracking my behaviour and selling it to advertisers.

Thus, I need to find the web browser that monetizes another way.

Market research… if you would call it that way

The need for a paid web browser is not as widespread yet. Same as the need for paid, high-quality search engines. But the demand is growing steadily.

I've known Orion browser for more than a year now, and I have been its monthly supporter for multiple months. It's a good webkit-based browser with modern feature set, privacy, and performance in mind. They even managed to add Chrome and Firefox extensions support (at least partial, with steady improvements over time). A bit rough on the edges, it's still in beta, but overall, it's been my favourite so far.

But I was curious.

I did not go into deep and widespread research on the topic, and did not test all the dozens of web browsers available on the market. But I have found something interesting, and that's what I'm going to share here.

I'm talking about a new web browser with a ridiculous name and visuals, even though it was built for serious work and research: Horse. Yes, it is really the name of a real web browser 😅

The product is good

I don't know if you're a fan of horses. If you're not (like myself), you can disable that art-house 3D horse on the home page from the app settings, and focus on the product itself.

The product initially started from the idea of a vertical tab tree (that is not quite new), but went way deeper:

• The vertical tab tree itself is similar to the one that can be found in Orion, with infinite nesting and easy drag-and-drop organization.
• It also has some additional capabilities that I, personally, found to be similar to the ones found in Arc. I'm talking about such features as folders, tabs renaming, and notes. These, combined with infinite tab nesting, provide a powerful toolkit.
• Your research starts with an area, a high-level container for tabs and folders. It's much like a workspace in Arc, or saved window in Orion, or tab group in Safari. But all your areas live in a sidebar, and you can expand or collapse them according to your current focusing needs.

The browser values your web browsing history in two very distinct ways:

• It makes sure that your tabs are persistent, meaning that they survive, regardless of what happens — browser relaunch, system crash, whatever. This might sound basic, but it's not. I cannot tell you how many times I needed to restore the lost browser tabs in Orion, or do some manual work to be sure whether they persist or not in Arc.
• By default, it opens the links that you click in a new nested tab instead of the current tab. The result is that the tab tree reflects your web browsing history in a very visually intuitive way. This behaviour can be customized either via app settings or via keyboard shortcut.

You never need to worry that you'll have too many tabs opened because the browser organizes them for you into a collapsible tree. And you never have to worry about performance, either, because the browser unloads inactive tabs automatically.

Moreover, the browser has been built with power users in mind, so:

• Almost every tab management action can be performed via a customizable keyboard shortcut.
• It allows you to copy a link to a particular page or even a whole tab tree, either as plain web links or as Markdown with titles and links.

It has its limitations, which I'll describe below, and because of them, I would rather call it an additional research/work tool, not a browser replacement. It will most likely not be a good fit to substitute your current main browser of choice.

But it definitely can complement your main browser in specific web research-related and work-related workflows, where you work with many tabs and don't want to lose the context over time.

Architectural limitations

The browser is built on Electron, and does not support Chrome extensions installation, at least yet. As a partial replacement, they included Ghostery and Dark Reader into the app bundle, as well as their own password manager. Unfortunately, I stumbled into some websites that were turned completely black, presumably due to the bug in the embedded Dark Reader.

Furthermore, it's a little bit confusing at first that it works in a single window mode, no multi-window support. But, to be frank, I rarely noticed this limitation, as tab management and area management is so good that it removes the need for multiple windows.

They don't have cross-device tab sync, either. But with the ability to copy the whole tab tree, it's pretty easy to transfer your research from one device to another when you need. So it's not a dealbreaker, in my opinion, even though I actively use iMac and MacBook in parallel.

And yes, they don't have a mobile app, desktop only.

"Critical mess" of the startup

Now, it's essential to understand that what surrounds the product really matters. The infrastructure surrounding the product, or "holistic product experience", can have a major impact on the product perception, experience, churn rate, and ultimately — business results.

And here is where the Horse browser gets really ugly.

1. You need to bind your credit card even to start the trial. This is usually a show-stopper for me, but this time I risked and did that because I was curious. But further experience was far from perfect, as mentioned below.
2. Billing is difficult to find. I received my license key. And started looking for a way to stop the trial, to avoid any charges if I don't like the product. I was writing to the support, looking in the email, then on the website. Found only the "Buy" button, and no "Manage license" button that I was looking for. After a while found a link buried inside the "Billing & Invoices" section of the support page.
3. They changed their domain name multiple times. So you can find references to browser.horse, gethorse.com, horsebrowser.org, which is confusing. Moreover, they redirected domain names, but not the emails. So, when you're trying to write to support@browser.horse you end up with an error, even though this email address is the default "reply to" when you receive your link to enter customer portal.
4. They're in the process of changing their pricing. During my 7-days trial, the price changed from 20 USD per year to 29 USD per year. Currently, it shows me 40 EUR per year (Why EUR if I'm in Canada? Don't ask, you know the answer: startup mess). Imagine how confused would I be by the charge if I did not disable the trial beforehand? Single-time purchase jumped from 100 USD to 120 EUR / 195 CAD, either. So, it's clear that they're experimenting, feeling undervalued, and they are not afraid to break things. Which is ultimately not good for the end user.
5. Discord invitation does not work. I tried from multiple accounts, and every time I was rejected. This is the first time I've ever been rejected, I am an active Discord user and member of multiple communities.
6. Discord is difficult to find. The website mentions Discord without actually providing a link to it, you need to find the link in the email with your license key. And, as mentioned above, it does not even always work reliably for some weird reason.
7. Support is inaccessible. I never received any response to my emails. I failed to enter the Discord server. Furthermore, I contacted online Intercom support, was met by a not-so-smart AI bot that did not help much, and requested email follow-up, but never ever received it.

Conclusion

So, ultimately, I ended up alone with the app, with no access to support and/or developer whatsoever, hesitating if I would like to invest in such a tool and developer. And ultimately decided that I won't. Even though the product itself appears to be promising, the supplementing attitude of low care about the customer does not provide enough trust to invest in the product.

There are plenty of examples of startups that behave differently, and take great care of their customers. NotePlan, Godspeed, Capacities, Reflect, to name a few. All of them are 1–5 people, but the attitude has been very different from the very start.

Thus, currently, I am using Orionas my main web browser and research tool. And support its development via paid Orion+ subscription.

Unfortunately, I still need to work with some Chrome plugins that are not very well-supported by Orion, so I resort to Arc for these legacy compatibility reasons. In particular, Readwise and Bluedot are critical at the moment.

I'd like to love The Horse and to welcome it as a new "internet research tool" in my app stack, but I'm afraid it does not deserve that place just yet. Nevertheless, I will sincerely hope that the authors of the tool would be able to improve the situation with their customer service.