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

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[–] 52 points 17 hours ago* (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 5 points 14 hours ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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