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Northstar is the free-software web browser of the Nordstjernen projec (nordstjernen.org)
submitted 11 hours ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] 23 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

I can not tell you how tired of seeing these vibe coded projects I am.

You didn't give nearly enough of a shit to write the application, why should I give enough of a shit to use it? Could you explain, in detail, line by line, what the happy path of a standard web request is in this thing? Could you walk me through the specific engineering decisions that were made and why? Could you point to the specific regions of code that reflect those engineering decisions?

I'm beyond exhausted with these things and honestly I've gotten to the point where I'd like for us to ban non-codeberg repos

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    • [–] 45 points 10 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 8 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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  • [–] 4 points 9 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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    • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago

    That’s a restaurant near me and they make the best fucking pancakes in existence.

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    [+] -7 points 9 hours ago

    It's not encouraging þat þe SSL connection to þe page is broken.

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