Long-Time Slashdot Reader Announces New Open Source Web Browser 'Northstar' (nordstjernen.org)
- Reference: 0186017500
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/10/04/0127201/long-time-slashdot-reader-announces-new-open-source-web-browser-northstar
- Source link: https://nordstjernen.org/northstar-browser/
> One window, one page, one process — about 160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. It carries no upstream browser engine: no Gecko, no WebKit, no Blink. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later , and it runs on Linux, macOS and Windows...
>
> Compliance is not inherited from an upstream engine; it is measured, section by section, against the specification text... Private by construction. No telemetry, no update pings, and no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs. Safe browsing checks a top-level navigation's host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before it is fetched — the check never leaves your machine. Cookies, storage and the cache are partitioned by origin.
It's logo reminds me of the old Netscape logo. (And I love the "Best viewed in..." GIF at the upper-right of its web site.)
[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~Andreas(R)
[2] https://nordstjernen.org/northstar-browser/
[3] https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser
[4] https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser/releases/tag/1.0.11
Re: North Star hunh? (Score:2)
I think it's mou (long).
I thought that was a more appreciative comment than a smiley.
Unsure. :)
Go Ken!
Very cool (Score:3)
This is very cool, will be playing with this today.
Wow, thank you Slashdot! (Score:3)
Available for Windows on [1]Windows store [microsoft.com]
Git repo [2]https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen-browser [github.com].
There are 3 variants of the browser now, so we can do experiments and research. We also need funding. All variants are available open source.
We are 3 developers now, a Polish man, a Spaniard, and me in Norway.
[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p39zb79jv0t
[2] https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen-browser
Re: (Score:2)
"Developers".
"We also need funding."
Running out of Claude tokens too often?
Dillo (Score:3)
According to the site it has no support for:
* Tabs
* Multiple windows
* Modern video
* WebGL
* WebGPU
* Extensions/Plugins
It reminds me of a more modern Dillo [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] except with Javascript and more CSS. It could be useful for appliances that just need an HTML viewer, access to a Wiki, documentation viewer, or for testing.
It is a small subset of [2]https://nordstjernen.org/ [nordstjernen.org] which is much more capable (but much larger/more complex).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo
[2] https://nordstjernen.org/
That means no ad blocking (Score:2)
A browser that does not support ad blocking is a non-starter. You simply can't use today's Internet without ad blocking in place.
Re: (Score:2)
> "A browser that does not support ad blocking is a non-starter. You simply can't use today's Internet without ad blocking in place."
I agree. It is why you should use Firefox + UBO, or one of its forks (LibreWolf, WaterFox, whatever). But that is why I said the use case is for things like a wiki, documentation, appliances, or for testing. The same type of things one might do with Dillo.
Why not (Score:3, Insightful)
> AGENTS.md CLAUD.md .agent/skills .claude
> Commits on Oct 3, 2026
> claude committed yesterday
> claude committed yesterday
> claude committed yesterday
> claude committed yesterday
> claude committed yesterday
I suppose as long as we have these mass license+copyright bypass onions at our disposal, we may as well use them to make alternative browser engines?
Sure. Why not.
Re: (Score:1)
yeah but then your applications future is tied to a propriety Claude account, it knows your codebase, your prompts and style, the context, your system prompt, yours and its quirks, cant just up and move to another model (preferably at 127.0.0.1) and expect it to carry on like the previous model, if Claude disappears tomorrow then what ? your application is dead in the water.
Re: (Score:2)
It's one thing to do this in the first place, it's quite another to call this "written from scratch".
Sorry, but no (Score:1)
The overwhelming concern for any browser these days is security. And that means looking at all the libraries that get pulled in as well. And suddenly things get a lot more murky. Until we get real defense-in-depth as a mandatory requirement in all software that can be taken seriously, this is an arms-race and a single person cannot compete.
Re: Sorry, but no (Score:2)
We are 3 developers now for the main browser.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No chance. And since you start with slop, completely forget about it. Nice hobbyist demo project, but that is it.
Re: (Score:2)
You haven't seen what Claude is capable of.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, it'll carry out your prompt ("Clod, make me a minimalist browser"), now you don't even have to know how to code!
Soon, your fridge will be sending you texts and emails to tell you that your milk will expire in 43 1/2 hours.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd wish for the opposite: Suppose a modern browser would use libraries for everything. A video element? Use the appropriate system libraries. Canvas? Could probably be implemented using some Gtk/Qt drawing primitives. And then you don't need to update a 200 MB browser each time a single component needs an update, but your usual system-wide updates also update the relevant browser components, without changing the overall browser experience. Browsers could also share these libraries. Why does each browser ne
Even the description is AI written. (Score:3)
The entire thing has the funk of bullshot. Yay.
Re: (Score:2)
Came here to say this... been using Claude enough to smell it's descriptive style a mile away...
"Compliance is not inherited from an upstream engine; it is measured, section by section, against the specification text... Private by construction. No telemetry, no update pings, and no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs. Safe browsing checks a top-level navigation's host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before it is fetched — the check never leaves your machine"
Can't overstress how much I hate this
I genuinely wish you the best of luck! (Score:3, Insightful)
Modern JavaScript and CSS are insanely complex ... and are not just for silly decoration, but for needed functionality and things like WCAG compliance.You sure have your work cut out for you.
I very much want real alternatives though, and I do genuinely wish you success!
Maybe a DamnSmall Linux browser candidate. (Score:2)
More than once I thought to myself: "Ya know, way back in the day, it was wise to write source code such that it was as small and lightweight and efficient as possible in terms of excecution effort and RAM usage and driver read-write activity because of the hardware limitations we had to deal with. As hardware evolved we became less and less concerned with that. Wonder what would happen if we just started over and took today's modern hardware and took the old-school super-lightweight approach to software
Re: (Score:2)
.....to clarify: metaphorically sort of like owning a high end sports car and putting Shell V-Power Nitro Premium grade fuel in it instead of regular unleaded.
Re: (Score:2)
Or having a multi-core system and running the world's most tightly coded single-threaded application on it. Performance is more than good wishes.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the code you strat with shouldn't be AI slop like this project.
Re: (Score:2)
"As hardware evolved we became less and less concerned with that."
That's not true, your problem is who you think "we" is. For application programmers, arguably there hasn't been concern since the early 90s. But the majority of programming is embedded where constrained systems make you care about resource usage.
"Do we get lightning speed performance?"
No, lightning performance results from care and good work, not hypotheticals.
"There's no point in doing that without a minimalist browser that can still surf
Re: Maybe a DamnSmall Linux browser candidate. (Score:2)
Yeah, it is a little grating that software tends to feel like it's running "at the same speed" as software from the 80s or 90s. As hardware gets faster and faster, software seems to just get more bloated to compensate. Frameworks and libraries can be too blame for a lot if it. But also the lack of need to optimise anything. I'd love to see a modern (young-ish) developer trying to write something for the 32k machines of the 80 (C=64, say), or even the 512k machines like the Amiga and Atari.
That would b
Go a step further to better free&open standard (Score:2)
I know there is an XKCD about standards (and adding yet one more to create yet more confusion).
"Standards"
[1]https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
But that said, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all terrible standards in many ways because of their complexity (and major design flaws like JavaScript having vastly too many global variables). Asa an alternative, what if, say, we all just used something like Scheme (or Common Lisp) to encode web documents and web code as S-expressions in some semantically standardized formats? Scheme
[1] https://xkcd.com/927/
ehh (Score:2)
I mean the software is impressive and all, but since when is someone with a user ID in the 400,000s a long-time reader?
Re:ehh (Score:5, Funny)
It happened when you got old and apparently didn't notice.
BTDT.
Re: (Score:3)
That doesn't consider how many times he's changed his ID due to personal humiliations.
This is amazing (Score:2)
Just getting the stack up to render all of this shit is cool as shit. Maybe try and look for niches browser vendors are too corporate to touch and do them anyway?
Something I think could eventually have a huge impact if it ever caught on is diversifying away from PKI and the curse of the ubiquitous adhoc web login form... Support for whatever PAKEs are in OpenSSL like TLS-SRP. These let you login to websites securely without any certs via secure phishing resistant mutual password authentication bound to th
Other details (Score:2)
North Star binaries available from Microsoft Store:
[1]https://apps.microsoft.com/det... [microsoft.com]
Based on the minimalist browser for linux:
[2]https://github.com/nordstjerne... [github.com]
The author has started a third version based on a different JavaScript engine, which is incomplete:
[3]https://github.com/nordstjerne... [github.com]
[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P39ZB79JV0T
[2] https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen-browser
[3] https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/open-internet-navigator
Why not Rust? (Score:4, Informative)
You're writing this new in 2026. You're using AI Agents to do a lot of the work, it seems, based on the files in the repo.
And you are writing it in C ??!!?
Now, I love C -- I love that you can do anything at the hardware level, and do crazy stuff with pointers, and all the low level goodness. It's a fun language, seriously powerful, fast.
But C makes it notorious easy to introduce a plethora of security issues! Not matter how hard you (or your agent) try, they WILL get in there. Buffer overruns being the simplest to exploit, and the simplest to accidentally include (and can be hard to find too).
So why not Rust? Why not just take the easier option to safety. Especially with something that you want many other people to be using. Rust is powerful, secure, fast. I really can't see a reason to not use it for a project like this.
I daresay it's not too late to have your agent rewrite everything in Rust. It's 160kloc. It won't take it long.
Re: Why not Rust? (Score:2)
I understand C well, I don't know Rust. C is like the latin of programming languages. That's why I chose C.
Re: (Score:2)
Latin in a dead language, so, maybe, it's time to learn something a bit more modern? :p
Re: (Score:2)
And a new meme is born. 'Imagine this written in Rust'...
On a Beowulf cluster.
Re: (Score:1)
After building this from source to try it out, I agree 100% with your assessment. The fact that I could barely keep it running for more than a few seconds without it dumping core does not indicate much attention paid to memory safety. I didn't debug into any of the core dumps, because I now regret the time already invested. That level of instability in 2026 is completely avoidable and inexcusable.
North Star... (Score:2)
I've been seeing this term pop up a few times lately-- are the LLMs starting this trend?
How does Claude and GPL make sense together? (Score:2)
Can anybody explain? So we can use the plagiarizing genAI backend to generate software, then we label it as GPL, which is then ignored by other plagiarizing genAI crawlers, and is used to limit real developers? Why use GPL? Is it important that no other besides AIs can benefit commercially from the code? Might as well be public domain, as all AI-generated code should be.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok incorrect assumption here, that GPL hurts profitability, bit of a brainfart really now that I think of it
AI slop, now as a browser? (Score:2)
The entire description sounds Claudish, and "160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person" is utter BS. Must have been written by AI and said human who is claiming to read all that code has probably never worked on a project nearly as big. 160k LOC per person is completely unrealistic. Already at 20k most devs become very slow, i.e., can no longer remember how all of it worked and need to refamiliarise themselves with parts of the code when they review changes to it.
cognitive dissonance (Score:1)
To boast that the browser has no AI built-in but then use Claude to write it.
The code is self-explaining. (Score:2)
From the repo: The code is self-explaining. Don't write code comments.
since you aren't writing the code why not ask the AI to add in comments?
Minimally I like a header for each function but that's because around the time Java hit the ground we seem to have lost the art of the man page.
Uah no (Score:3)
What's the use case for this unless you work for the DoD? Even before we talk about horrendous javascript performance (though surprisingly good Acid scores), where it shows Google maps running at around a frame every 2 seconds when moving around the map, the UI doesn't scale so I literally can't read any text on a 4K monitor. I can't even really make out the symbols they used on the buttons.
Re:Uah no (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything starts small. You're probably comparing to 30 year old browsers (with a million open bugs in their bugtracker). If this is written from scratch without using code from other browsers, it is damn impressive what already works.
Re:Uah no (Score:4, Interesting)
> Everything starts small. You're probably comparing to 30 year old browsers (with a million open bugs in their bugtracker). If this is written from scratch without using code from other browsers, it is damn impressive what already works.
"Claude, write me a web browser. Start with the core components required for a minimal viable product."
[1]https://github.com/nordstjerne... [github.com]
From scratch, in a sense. Scratching deez nuts.
[1] https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
Re: (Score:1)
So this thing is slop? Even more reasons not to use it. It means everything not specified in detail is suspect, missing, broken or insecure and maintenance will be an absolute nightmare.
Re: (Score:1)
Yep. The announcement had the smell of "vibe-coded" and the GitHub repo confirms it.
No thanks.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Who wouldn't use AI for starting a potentially huge new project? Don't let the boomers ruin your day, AI is now ubiquitous in SWE.
Re: (Score:2)
I would not. But then again, I'm old-school and retired, so I get to develop the way I want, not the way some corporate bean-counter wants.
Re: (Score:2)
So what? Your impression doesn't get any work done for me.
Re:Uah no (Score:4, Informative)
The case for this browser, is that there needs to be multiple independents web browsers, to push for innovation. Google Chrome is NOT open source, and is bloated and monopolistic. Competition drives innovation!
Northstar browser is implements in C, takes a few minutes to compile and is secure because it doesn't rely on a JIT compiler.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Come to think of, the whole article sounds very much like slop.
Of course the claim that secure or not is a question of using a JIT compiler is completely bogus and just demonstrates that the one making it has absolutely no clue about software security.
Re: (Score:2)
The exclamation point at the end is a clue.
Re: (Score:2)
"...and is secure because it doesn't rely on a JIT compiler."
LOL SuperKendall is that you?
Re: Uah no (Score:2)
Also, pushes standards compliance. And (pipe dreaming) with wide adoption might result in downscaling of all the layers of web 2.0 malarky that slow everything down so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Andreas(R)... but it works.
It's funny how everyone talks about 'secure' browsers... the browser can be Fort Knox, but if you click on the wrong link or download the wrong thing, you'll learn how secure it is.
Not to mention, how does it handle stuff like YouTube or Discord or Zoom? Does it handle plug-ins like AdBlocker?