What is nordstjernen?

Nordstjernen is a web browser built entirely from scratch in the C programming language. Unlike the major browsers most people use, which all share one of just three underlying rendering engines, Nordstjernen is an independent implementation that parses HTML, applies CSS styles, and runs JavaScript on its own. The project's goal is to offer a real alternative to the browser monoculture, where a handful of vendors control what the web can and cannot do. The browser is intentionally small by design. The entire source code is around 30,000 lines, small enough for one person to read in a day, and it starts up in milliseconds, using only a few tens of megabytes of memory at idle. There are no background services, and it collects no telemetry, sends nothing home, and does not ping for updates. Security is a central focus. Nordstjernen deliberately omits features frequently exploited in other browsers, such as WebGL, hardware accelerated graphics APIs, service workers, and extensions. On Linux, it enforces a filesystem sandbox and a strict filter on allowed system calls. Cookies are partitioned per site by default, third party cookies are blocked, and HTTPS enforcement is on. For everyday browsing, it handles HTML5, modern CSS, and JavaScript using a lightweight engine called QuickJS. It targets text heavy sites like news, Wikipedia, search, and documentation. It also includes a headless mode for generating text output, screenshots, or PDFs from a URL without a visible window. The browser runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows from a single source tree. It is released under a source available license that converts to MIT ten years after each release.