I tried a web browser without tabs, bookmarks, or navigation — and loved it

When it comes to web browsers, I am an inveterate tab hoarder (current count: over 400). It’s my main vice and is a hard habit to kick. I often find myself falling down the “Wikipedia hole,” opening tab after tab on topics that interest me, and before long I’m confronted with a mass of pages and no idea how I got to where I am.

In other words, I think I need help. But there’s been a glimmer of hope on the horizon, as I’ve come across a strangely named browser called Horse that claims it can banish tab hoarding and offer a much better way to peruse the internet. Can it end my annoying tab habit (tabit?) once and for all?

Goodbye tabs

Horse works very differently from normal browsers. It’s built by two people and has a small community of users, making it a far cry from behemoths like Chrome and Firefox, the latter of which is my long-time browser of choice. Horse brands itself as a tool for students and researchers, but also insists it’s ideal for a broader array of people — journalists, designers, developers, shoppers, and more. Oh, and I nearly forgot the kicker: There are no bookmarks, no viewing history and no tabs.

Instead of tabs, Horse uses what it calls “Trails.” These are nested pages that can be used to organize topics. Every time you click a new link, it becomes a new entry in the list of nested pages, which are housed in the sidebar. This makes it simple to see how you got to where you are currently browsing. The idea is to make organization simpler and prevent you being overwhelmed when you dive deep into a topic.

I’ll be honest: I was skeptical of Horse at first. Could I really break tabs’ vice-like grip over me? What would happen to those 400+ tabs currently waiting for me in Firefox? I know they’re still out there, after all. Picking up Horse would mean abandoning them all for good.

The lack of bookmarks was also a concern to me. Surprise surprise, I have a huge number of bookmarks in Firefox, but saving pages for later is less tidy in Horse. I can’t bookmark a tab, close it, and come back to it later if I need to. If I want to save it, it must always be open, which I worried would cause the sidebar to become messy.

In other words, this was going to take some getting used to. But I quickly found out that there might just be something interesting lurking in Horse’s approach.

Forging a new Trail

In use, Horse is a world away from what you expect from a plain old regular web browser. There’s certainly a learning curve, but it’s far from insurmountable. In the end, there’s a lot to like about it.

Let’s start with Trails, the key feature of Horse. Every time you click a link, a new page (called a “SubTrail”) appears in the sidebar nested underneath the last page you were on. After a few clicks, you start to see a clear hierarchy of where you’ve navigated on the web. It’s something I quickly found myself enjoying. You can see your browsing history right there in front of you, and it’s super fast to get back to any page you want to by selecting it in the sidebar, even if it’s been many clicks since you visited it. On a regular browser, navigating that far back is much more cumbersome.

Interestingly, there’s no back button in Horse because it’s quick enough to just select the previous page from your Trail. This stumped me at first — I spent a few confusing seconds aimlessly searching for a button that wasn’t there — but it feels natural quickly enough.

Trails do create something of a mess of links, though. You can manually drag and drop pages into other Trails, which is a neat little feature, but your sidebar will quickly fill up with pages and Trails. If you want to see your history at all times, that’s great, but it can feel a bit cluttered.

Fortunately, Horse lets you shuffle this mess out of the way (at least partially), as each Trail can be collapsed so that you only see the Trail header text (called, appropriately, the TrailHead). I’d still rather have bookmarks so that I can clear out the sidebar without losing the pages forever, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

You don’t have to open a SubTrail by clicking a new link — you manually open a new SubTrail and type in your link or search query instead. That’s handy for organization, say if you are reading a page and get an idea to visit a related website and want to keep the two pages closely associated within the Trail list. You can also create “SideTrails,” which are additional pages added to a Trail that are not nested underneath another page. It sounds confusing, but it makes a lot more sense once you start using the browser.

Horse also lets you drag and drop pages to reorder them, add emojis to their titles, and rename them. That means that you can use it as a sort of ersatz to-do list app, such as by putting the most important page at the top of a Trail and adding due dates to the page titles. When you complete a task, you can delete it from the Trail. It’s not something I used a whole lot, and it’s unlikely to replace your dedicated to-do app, but it’s interesting to see that Horse is flexible enough to work this way (even if it is a bit rudimentary).

I should also note that Horse is a beautifully designed browser. It’s very minimalist, with visual features that are all excellently considered, from the fonts and icons to the use of color and translucency. It’s apparent that Horse’s creators spent just as much time thinking about how it looks as they did thinking about how it works.

Missing features

It’s not all great, though, and Horse is notably missing a few key features from other browsers.

One absence that I’ve really noticed is the lack of extension support. I use a lot of fantastic browser extensions with Firefox, from privacy-protecting safeguards like Consent-O-Matic to money savers such as Honey. Almost none of these work in Horse. While it has its own password manager and comes with two external extensions included (Ghostery for ad blocking and Dark Reader for dark mode), it’s not much to go on compared to rival products. The developer says they aim to add broader extension support but that it’s out of their budget right now. Hopefully that’ll change soon.

There are other small niggles. It would be helpful if the URL bar autofilled sites after you’ve been there once before, for example, instead of requiring you to type the whole thing every time. Horse also has a few too many top-level dividers in the sidebar — Trails can take the form of Areas (Trails that have a large header at the top) or folders (Trails that, uhh, don’t have a large header) and it was never immediately clear why I should use one and not the other.

Then there’s the price. We are all used to browsers being free, but Horse requires payment up front. Its price of $20 a month or $60 for lifetime access makes you think twice about going ahead. Compounding that is the fact that Horse doesn’t offer a free trial — there is a 14-day refund period, but not everyone wants to shell out $60 just to see if they like a product. This stance feels like it will prevent curious people from giving the browser a fair try, which could be a problem when Horse does things so differently to every other browser and really requires hands-on time to understand it.

An impressive achievement

Horse is an impressive achievement for a two-person team — it’s not just yet another browser to be added to the pile but one that actually attempts to rethink how a browser should work on a fundamental level. For the most part, it succeeds, and I’m confident its shortcomings will be addressed in time.

That brings me to my final question: Is Horse worth its price tag? Answering that depends on your specific needs. If you just want a slightly different browser, it’s probably not what you’re looking for. But if you’re after one that addresses a pain point, specifically one relating to tabs and online research, it’s an intriguing offering and one that you might find is worth the price.

I’m glad there’s a one-off purchase option. Many people are wary of subscriptions, and $60 for lifetime access feels reasonable when you directly compare it to the $20 that you’ll pay every month for the rolling subscription. It’s also a lot less than the $99 that Horse used to charge for the one-off payment.

It’s hard to get past our conditioned feeling that web browsers should be free, and it’s absolutely valid to feel that you’d rather stick to cost-free alternatives. But Horse definitely brings something new to the table, and it doesn’t take long for its Trails system to prove its worth to your browsing experience. If you fall within its target audience, it might be just what you’ve been needing to tame your tab overload.