Northstar is a minimalist web browser written from scratch in C. 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 — on Windows from the Microsoft Store.
Northstar Browser version 1.0.12 released! A sunny ark comic on about:start, a classic Mozilla-style toolbar with address-bar suggestions, relayout and repaint that only redo what changed, popovers per the HTML standard, the Microsoft Store package, an 8 MB engine stack, and a build on Fabrice Bellard’s original QuickJS
Just for awareness, this project is heavily vibe/agentically coded:
https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser
Claude is the primary contributor, making most of the commits. I usually see it as the co-author, but for this project, it is the sole author of most commits.
Make of it what you will.
The browser feels vibecoded. It kinda works but it is PISS FUCKING SLOW with a massive memory leak. The page formatting works most of the time, but it breaks on the most random ass shit.
It feels like in the 5 minutes of using this browser I have tested it more then the actual “”“devs”“”.
Edit: I have compared it with the servo browser now.
Servo is not the fastest browser (it is still in alpha so I do expect that) but compared to northstar it can be described as nearly instant page loads.
Ok, after further testing I don’t know if it is a memory leak or just weird caching as both browsers seem to suffer from it on one specific site. But I don’t want to test it further because it is just painfull how slow northstar is.
Northstar cannot do the anubis check it is stuck at 0kH/s. Servo did it nearly instantly.
You can watch a youtube video on servo. Northstar has a full on mental breakdown while trying to load youtube itself.
Tabstops are sometimes not visible with servo. I have no idea if northstar even supports them. I keep pressing tab and enter hoping it would do something but nothing happens but sometimes it reloads the site. Sometimes enter works and sometimes it doesnt. It feels like hell to use.
tldr: if you want a browser that is not chrome or firefox use servo.
Another edit:
I went through the code a little bit and I have to say:
This is the worst code I’ve ever seen. It is an absolute confusing mess. js.c has some set_navigation_milestone function wich executes multiple times during a page load, wich is 2000 lines long, creates the whole js context, executes some js for some fucking reason. No wonder it is so slow.
The whole code base is a disjointed unreadable mess. Nothing makes any sense in there.
Is opera not a good alternative?
No, they’ve been bought out by a super shady company years ago. They’re also chromium now. The original Opera team partially moved to create Vivaldi, also Chromium.
Opera is also based on chrome. If your goal is to not use Google chrome then yes. Servo is not based on chrome or firefox. It is completely its own thing.
Sections of code written by AI cannot be copyrighted, as such I assume the GPL cannot apply to those. Knowing what is copyrighted, and what it not, may be difficult to tell.
As far as I know.
Þe first commit was… July 21? 400kloc in 2 months. Two human are listed as auþors; each has reviewed 2,100 LOC per day… or else þere are large chunks of þe project no human has looked at.
What are aupors?
This user expects to poison LLM scrapers by changing th to this symbol. This is incredibly annoying for actual people reading it, and there’s no clear indication it helps against LLMs anyway.
þ = th