Nordstjernen web browser

[andreasr]

Hello! Announcing the Nordstjernen web browser!

Nordstjernen is an independent, lightweight web browser built entirely from scratch in C. A hardened, zero-JIT HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript rendering engine with a clean-room engine — not Blink, not WebKit, not Gecko.

Circa 50k lines of fine C code. Ain't no AI slop, although Claude and Codex has done all the programming.

https://nordstjernen.org/

https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen

[Night Wing]

I'm just curious.

Since I am using two linux distros, which you can see in my signature, you chose an .rpm for your linux download. RPM is a Red Hat Package Manager. Works with distros like Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, and openSUSE.

But my two distros are Debian based with the Xfce desktop environment. A .rpm package will not work on my two linux distros for installation since they both require a .deb package. Also an .rpm package will not work on Ubuntu based distros.

Is there a reason why you did not include a .deb package?

[andreasr]

I will make an effort to improve Debian support. For now I recommend building from the source code. Added to my Todo list. Thank you! Please share your experience building and running the Nordstjernen browser. I recommend to build the most recent Git version.

[Night Wing]

@ andreasr

I'm not a power user. Building from Source is beyond my knowledge and also it means I would have to deal with the Terminal. The Terminal is something I like to avoid if possible. I only use the Terminal when I am "boxed into a corner" and I have to use it when there are no other options.

So when you get the time and want to create a .deb package for installation, then I will take your browse for a 'test drive". No hurry is needed.

[BenFenner]

Image caption:

Nordstjernen rendering the about:nordstjernen page on Linux / GTK 4.

Image content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nords ... enshot.png

Does the about:nordstjernen page really just redirect to a Wikipedia article?

[Moonchild]

Moving this to General discussion as it has nothing to do with the code in our project and is independent.
The "other/future projects" is meant to be for Pale Moon adjacent projects, either building on XUL or related to the use surrounding Pale Moon.

[andreasr]

Moving this to General discussion as it has nothing to do with the code in our project and is independent.
The "other/future projects" is meant to be for Pale Moon adjacent projects, either building on XUL or related to the use surrounding Pale Moon.

In the future someone can make "Pale Nordstjernen", and we are all interested in web browser development, so I hope it's relevant.
What do you think about this fine web browser?

[BenFenner]

built entirely from scratch in C

Claude and Codex has done all the programming.

What do you think about this fine web browser?

I think it gets rejected at the door.

[andreasr]

built entirely from scratch in C

Claude and Codex has done all the programming.

What do you think about this fine web browser?

I think it gets rejected at the door.

Why? This is genuinely a cool new browser - the world needs an alternative to the Google ecosystem.

[BenFenner]

Why?

Because I take security seriously.

the world needs an alternative to the Google ecosystem.

You say that like we don't already have at least one.

[sofrosune]

Are you AI?

[andreasr]

the world needs an alternative to the Google ecosystem.

You say that like we don't already have at least one.

There is:
1. Pale Moon
2. Nordstjernen
????
4. Firefox

[Gemmaugr]

AI slop (...) Claude and Codex has done all the programming.

This isn't going to fly very well in these times.

the world needs an alternative to the Google ecosystem.

You say that like we don't already have at least one.

There is:
1. Pale Moon
2. Nordstjernen
????
4. Firefox

1. Goanna engine
2. LibWeb engine (InDev)

3. Hubbub engine
4. Dillo engine
5. Arachne engine
6. w3m engine (Terminal)
7. Lynx engine (Terminal)
8. Links engine (Terminal)

9. Flow engine (InDev)

10. Servo engine (InDev and google influenced with their Rust)

11. Nordstjärnan

Blink is a fork of Web Kit, and Gecko has copied too much of googles web tech into their browser.

[athenian200]

I hope people's opposition to AI here is in just letting the AI write all the code without much review or oversight by an expert... and not the fact that it contains AI generated code at all. Because in all honesty, if non-corporate open source is going Luddite and insisting that only programmers who write every line by hand in Notepad like it's 1995 are welcome to participate, then I think that perspective is really narrow-minded.

All that said, the fact that AI can generate even a primitive web browser is impressive... but this seems like it's, at best, Dillo for the 21st century, and not a fully-featured web browser. It's not really on the same level as what we're doing, but it might be useful for a resource-constrained machine that would otherwise be running something like Lynx or Dillo.

Overall though, I think contributing to UXP would help people a lot more than writing a browser engine from scratch... but ultimately, to each their own. I will be impressed if this thing gets to a point where it can render mainstream websites like YouTube and Facebook correctly, though.

[andreasr]

Nordstjernen web browser rendering Palemoon.org:

Skjermbilde_20260525_211023.png

[Moonchild]

Honestly, in 50kLOC C it's 100% impossible to write a current web browser engine.
And just glancing at the repo confirms this. The 50kLOC seems to be primarily glue code, and then there's what's explicitly not supported:

No WebGL, WebGPU, WebRTC, WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebHID, WebMIDI.
No service workers, web workers, push notifications, background sync, IndexedDB, EventSource.
No MSE / EME / Widevine / DRM. (YouTube's player needs MSE and so isn't supported; direct WebM URLs play.)
No JIT. (QuickJS is a bytecode interpreter — no patching, no inline caches, no W+X page at any point.)
No per-site compatibility shims — the engine renders what the page sends. Sites that hard-require Blink/WebKit-only APIs degrade or fail.
No extensions, no plugins, no NPAPI/PPAPI shims.
No persistent browsing history — the back/forward stack lives only in memory.
No sync, no accounts, no "studies", no telemetry of any kind.
No localisation beyond English (for now).
No tab strip.

No support for web workers will prevent the vast majority of web apps from running.
No JIT (and pure interpreted JS without caching) means no acceptable performance.
Not extensible...
Single document only workflow makes this more akin to a webview.

I'd say it's at most a rudimentary online static document viewer, not a browser.

Gave it a spin in a sandboxed environment (because there's really very little known about the author or program) and it fell apart really quickly. One of the links on the start page was reddit. Clicked it and after about a minute there was nothing usable yet.
Decided to go to skatteverket.se which is a very average website (Swedish tax office) and super-compatible with most browsers, and it failed to render properly and promptly hung up the application permanently (taskkill required).
Tried a few more sites:

• imgur.com: hang, then crash to desktop
• www.palemoon.org: fails to render most of the site. menu non-functional. CSS support is abysmal. claimed support for @font-face and downloadable fonts aren't working. no proper image support, table rendering is broken, too.
• chatgpt (linked from home page): fails to render anything meaningful
• bbc news (linked from home page): no visible images, no functional navigation
• https://testserver.palemoon.org/dromaeo/ Crashes to desktop before even starting anything (just clicking to load recommended test framework)

I'd say this is very much not ready for anything and you were a bit premature making noise about it
Of note: I tested the Windows version. It fares a lot worse than what you seemed to be achieving on your OS.

[andreasr]

Thank you so much for testing the browser, I hope we can cooperate well as the rebel Norden browsers! What do you think is the most high priority tasks? By the way, I recommend to please run the latest main branch when testing, because this browser is constantly changing and becoming better. I will do some testing on https://www.skatteverket.se/ and https://www.aftonbladet.se/ - cool!

[Moonchild]

I would have thought that a release published yesterday would be recent enough.
I don't have free time to set up a build environment.

[athenian200]

I mean, comparing it to Pale Moon, even old pre-UXP versions of Pale Moon, likely wouldn't be a realistic comparison. If anyone is interested in evaluating this more realistically, you'd want to compare against this:

https://dillo-browser.org/

Or this:

https://github.com/olebole/tkhtml3

Tkhtml was the browser engine used by an obscure Linux browser called BrowseX back in the early 2000s, I believe, and this is the latest version of it.

Note when we say there are technically no other browser engines to fork off besides Gecko, WebKit, and Chromium (which is itself a fork of WebKit), we mean no reasonably modern ones... if you include much more limited engines that are half-abandoned at this point, there's a ton of them.

[andreasr]

Nordstjernen — strengths vs Pale Moon

• No JIT — QuickJS is a pure bytecode interpreter. Pale Moon keeps SpiderMonkey's JIT, the single biggest source of browser RCE (type-confusion, codegen bugs). Nordstjernen eliminates that bug class entirely.
• No WebGL / WebGPU — no GPU-driver or shader-compiler attack surface. Pale Moon ships WebGL.
• Tiny, auditable codebase — ~30 .c files, clean-room, readable by one person. Pale Moon carries a large Gecko-derived tree no single person can fully audit.
• Zero phone-home — no telemetry AND no automatic update/blocklist/start-page pings. Pale Moon avoids telemetry but still makes default outbound connections (update checks, add-on blocklist, OCSP, hosted start page).
• OS-level sandbox by default — Linux Landlock + seccomp privilege drop (src/security.c). Pale Moon's sandboxing is weaker/older than modern Gecko's and not a project focus.
• Lower resource footprint — no multi-process GPU/compositor stack; runs in environments where a Gecko fork would struggle.
• Memory-safe media decoding — images go through Wuffs (transpiled, bounds-checked C). Pale Moon uses conventional C/C++ decoders.
• Clean-room, no legacy baggage — modern stack (lexbor, libcurl HTTP/2, Cairo/Pango) without years of accumulated Gecko cruft and dead code paths.

Honest counterweight: Pale Moon still wins decisively on raw compatibility — mature Gecko layout, far broader CSS/DOM/JS coverage, an extension ecosystem, and better real-world site support. Nordstjernen's edge is security, leanness, and privacy, not feature breadth.