A long-time Slashdot reader announced Northstar, a minimalist web browser written from scratch in C at about 160,000 lines of original code, with one window, one page and one process and no upstream engine such as Gecko, WebKit or Blink, released as free software under the GNU GPL version 3 or later for Linux, macOS and Windows. It ships no telemetry or update pings and, by design, no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs, and its safe-browsing check compares a top-level navigation’s host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before the page is fetched, with cookies, storage and cache partitioned by origin. In the discussion the developer said there are now three browser variants and three developers, in Norway, Poland and Spain, and that the project needs funding. The same project’s larger browser, Nordstjernen, shipped version 1.0.28 the same day dual-licensed at the recipient’s option under the GNU GPL version 3 or later or the new Nordstjernen Source License 1.0, a source-available license that permits use, modification and redistribution except for a competing commercial product or service, with commercial licenses still available by written agreement.
Slashdot reader announces Northstar browser as sibling Nordstjernen adds a source-available license
A long-time Slashdot reader announced Northstar, a minimalist web browser written from scratch in C at about 160,000 lines of original code, with one window, one page and one process and no upstream engine such as Gecko, WebKit or Blink, released as free software under the GNU GPL version 3 or later for Linux, macOS and Windows. It ships no telemetry or update pings and, by design, no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs, and its safe-browsing check compares a top-level navigation's host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before the page is fetched, with cookies, storage and cache partitioned by origin. In the discussion the developer said there are now three browser variants and three developers, in Norway, Poland and Spain, and that the project needs funding. The same project's larger browser, Nordstjernen, shipped version 1.0.28 the same day dual-licensed at the recipient's option under the GNU GPL version 3 or later or the new Nordstjernen Source License 1.0, a source-available license that permits use, modification and redistribution except for a competing commercial product or service, with commercial licenses still available by written agreement.
Source: Slashdot