Prior to week 51, frost walker boots caused even ridden horses to freeze water, so you could ride a horse over the ocean.
MC-90585 changed things to fix a bug. It is unclear if the horse-frost-walking was originally an intentional feature which the other fix broke, or if it riding horses across oceans was never intended to be a feature. (I liked it, but it's up to the devs.)
Another option is to also resolve MC-93570 by having "Frost Walker I" not cause horses to frost, but "Frost Walker II" would causes horses to frost. (Right now there is little difference between different levels of Frost Walker, that could be an interesting distinction maybe.)
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Confirmed for 1.9. Also doesn't frost water when sitting in a boat above water level, which is related to the issue. MC-90585 was about ice forming under water. Unsure why they made it so all ridable entities do not form ice now.
Frost walker should activate while riding a horse, because it creates a quicker means of exploration for players who have invested the time to find the enchant. It makes a difficult to obtain reward even more valuable, and creates a very fun experience.
It would be preferable if these changes would be reversed, even if that meant frost walker causing issues while the user is in a boat. A user can take their boots off before getting in a boat. However, if the enchant does not work for mounts, there is no in-game solution.
As it was an unintended side effect of the development process of the Frostwalker enchantment, at least from the developers point of view, and a useful feature that opened up and inspired travel, to the players point of view, maybe make it so the Frostwalker enchantment can be applied to both Saddles and Horse Amour, as well as boots, making it possible to ride over the water once more, without breaking boats again...
I'd like to reopen this Bug report as nowadays horses like animals became irrelevant and Frost walker enchant is the most useless with the lowest use rate enchant in the game.
So to incentivize players to use them more it would be great to give Frost walker a new feature that while riding horses, donkeys, mules and camels while wearing frost walker boots the water would freeze and it would be more convenient to use horses like animals as a transportation means.
Please reconsider this possibility
Thanks
I don't think it was inetended, as you don't touch the ground with youur feet, I might be wrong tho