Horse – The Organized Browser

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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?

> “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.

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)?

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

https://minbrowser.org/

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

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

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

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);
    })();

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

Aaaaaaaand into the bullshit box it goes.

Could have been a browser extension, no?

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)

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.

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