Nordstjernen 1.0

bastawhiz

This is super cool, but man... writing something as complex as a browser from scratch in 2026 in a memory unsafe language feels like setting yourself up for so much trouble. I love the explosion of small from-scratch browsers that are popping up lately, but Ladybird switching from C++ to Rust is really the only case study you need in why memory safety is such a critical requirement for browsers. I'll look forward to more developments with Norfstjernen. What an exciting time for me browser engines!

ursuscamp

The readme says it's 88,000 lines of "hand-written" C, and yet there's only 41 commits all from the last day, and they're all co-authored by Claude. I have no problem with AI code, but it should not be advertised as hand-written.

webprofusion

Nice, surprised this isn't attracting more comments. Obviously it's an AI-first development and it doesn't render a lot of stuff but it's still impressive. We'll see more of these and hopefully with standard licenses like MIT (why go for a weird license on this one?) but what's interesting is how far you can get based on interpreting the standards and running industry tests. That suggest we need more written standards information (implementation guidance) and more tests.

theamk

Always nice to see more browsers! Interesting principles however... > No automated test suite — verify by running the browser. > No code comments beyond one header line per file

andai

I love the little netscape style buttons at the bottom of the readme: https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen

JoshTriplett

A proprietary web browser, written in C, in 2026. Nope.

aorth

Strictly commenting on the license: it's my understanding that, if an LLM like Claude wrote it, it's not copyrightable. Isn't that the consensus these days?