Nordstjernen, Northstar, Southstar: minimalist webbrowsers in C and Rust(nordstjernen.org)
59 points by Propelloni 3 days ago | 36 comments
[–] netsharc 2 days ago
Ha, nice homage to the Netscape "loading" GIF: the N in the corner. When Netscape was connecting to a website and loading the page (over your dozens of kilobits per second modem), there would be shooting stars behind the N (1). Because navigators relied on the night sky, I suppose.
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/6oqzjv/the_netsc...
I've managed to pimp my Vivaldi installation to have the animated N as well: it allows custom user profile icons, and when you set it to an animated GIF, it animates as well. Add a custom CSS for the browser UI so that the profile icon is square and not circular: we're back in the 90's!
[–] emilbratt 2 days ago
If I understand this correctly, Andreas Røsdal wants people to adopt first before putting in work. Thats the wrong way around.
You make a great project -> people notice and like it -> you improve -> more people notice.. and circle continues.
[–] Propelloni 3 days ago
Minimalist web browsers written from scratch in C (Nordstjernen, Northstar) or Rust (Southstar).
[–] vrganj 2 days ago
So one dude spent a bunch of tokens on not one, but three separate overambitious projects?
[–] lysace 2 days ago
So, is the creator Norwegian, Danish or neither?
[–] kalleboo 2 days ago
Claude is from the US
[–] bedstefar 2 days ago
I went to figure that out. Norwegian
[–] lofaszvanitt 2 days ago
I pray every night for a fast browser, because Chrome is getting slower and slower. And this fckd up sqlite implementation of history bookmarks etc is also a gargantuan fuckup. When you have multi year histories and gigantic amount of bookmarks, it is just ridiculously slow.
[–] VoidWhisperer 2 days ago
Interesting how he said (when facing issues getting packaged for Debian and Arch) that the project was stopping AI as of Oct 2026[0].. but if you check the projects, as of writing this comment, one of them had a Claude co-authored commit dated 7 hours ago [1].
Edit: Just to clarify, I would love to see more browser engine diversity, especially open source, but the guy running the project saying one thing and doing the opposite kind of rubs me the wrong way.
[0]: https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-web-browser/co...
[1]: https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-web-browser/co...
[–] Deeg9rie9usi 2 days ago
[–] vrganj 2 days ago
Yikes. What an asshole.
[–] scott01 2 days ago
> I decided to run a little experiment. So I asked a frontier model developed by my employer ...
[–] otabdeveloper4 2 days ago
[–] ronsor 2 days ago
[–] throwaway27448 2 days ago
Pretty damning tbh
[–] 0rzech 2 days ago
[–] wofo 2 days ago
[–] roryirvine 2 days ago
[–] wofo 2 days ago
> If the Northstar browser is included in Debian Linux, I will do my utmost to make the browser successful and ensure it works well in Debian, and I will make sure that the Debian project and Debian contributors like you, and the four of you in particular, will be rewarded.
[–] ordu 2 days ago
If it is so, it is a good reason to not include their browser into major distros, but in any case their advice "try to maintain it for longer and get some reputation first" make my (hypothetical) psychological portrait redundant. I mean, if I'm right, they would probably lose interest and/or completely alienate distros in a year or so.
[–] krapp 2 days ago
Even Linus is adding LLM generated code to the Linux kernel. No one cares anymore, that world is dead.
[–] 12_throw_away 2 days ago
xz-utils was 2 years ago now. It's surprising to me that people are still willing to apply any presumption of good faith and authenticity to interactions like this, especially after:
- "begging and praying" to include an unknown project in the distro
- offering what for all the world looks like an extremely clumsy bribe
- pushing a project full of contradictory and blatantly untrue claims
We don't have to - and in fact absolutely should not - evaluate projects based purely on "technical merit"! The people behind the project matter at least as much as "code quality."
And we absolutely should not be presuming good faith on the part of random people on the internet who have gotten ahold of our email addresses! Ask to see some credentials before turning your wallet over to the Wallet Inspector!
[–] ordu 2 days ago
1. I don't think that that attempt for open bribery can mean anything except social cluelessness. Their intentions doesn't matter, because their actions as they are can achieve only a rejection of his package. We can try to find a hypothesis that would assume that the effect of their words is exactly what they wanted it to be, but I think it would be too much into the opposite territory, the territory of paranoia, "ahh all people are trying to kill me", something like that.
2. I think you are confusing a presumption of good faith with a presumption of a basic courtesy. I can be very suspicious, but (if I were a debian maintainer) I want those maillists to be functional. And it means basic courtesy and a presumption of good faith. There is no need to accuse the other side of what you suspect them to explain your suspicions to them and everyone watching.
And if my words seem to you like I have no suspicions or ignore them, well... I'll treat it as an evidence of how good I am.
If you read my message, it doesn't presume bad faith, but it doesn't presume good either. It focuses on observable behavior, proposes a hypothesis about personal traits, but it touches their motivation only in passing. "they realized they can write a code" can be seen as a description of a motivation, but for me it is not, because it doesn't explain their particular way to apply their new abilities to write code. Why browser, why to package it for debian? Why they are so insistent on it?
[–] c22 2 days ago
[–] qphe95 2 days ago
[–] roryirvine 2 days ago
At that point, it became hard to write it off as mere misguided enthusiasm and LWN were being entirely responsible to write it up in the way they did.
In fact, if you search HN you can see that it's been pushed repeatedly here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/nordstjern...
There's a pattern of behaviour on display which, though it's not entirely clear if it was intended to be malicious, does end up looking remarkably like a clumsy replay of the Jia Tan attack.
[–] augment_me 2 days ago
There is an attention cost of pushing unverified slop onto others, public shaming and bans is a valid way to prevent this behaviour.
[–] qphe95 2 days ago
[–] nkrisc 2 days ago
[–] otabdeveloper4 2 days ago
Yes if by "developer" you mean "Claude prompt typer".
[–] totallygeeky 2 days ago
Maybe less time running tokens to develop the engines and more time running security passes before running to tell the world.