Nordstjernen Web Browser | Hacker News Reader

Nordstjernen Web Browser

github.com

27 pointsroschdal21 comments

Honest question: How can an entire html/CSS layout engine fit in a single layout.c that I can read over an afternoon? This looks too simple to be usable for serious work.

its not it uses:

https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor

Got it. Thanks!

So OP is misleading people in the Readme?

> The entire browser is ~30 kLOC of C — engine, JS bindings, chrome, and sandbox.

> Source-available under the Functional Source License v1.1 (FSL-1.1-MIT). Free for any non-competing use; converts to the MIT license on the tenth anniversary of each release. See LICENSE.

You should not use the FSL name if you change the date of the license switch, which is originally set to the second anniversary. If you want to change that duration, you should use a different name to avoid confusion.

Sentry intended for the FSL to be specific rather than general. The company's Deputy General Counsel stated:

> TLDR, FSL is narrow in scope for a reason.

> You're free to create your own license based on the FSL with AGPL as the change license if you rename it so that it isn't confusingly similar.

https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software/issues/53#issuecom...

Yes, I might change this back to 2 years, I am still thinking about the right balance between a free web browser and a commercial software product which will generate revenue.

What could go wrong.

I am making this web browser. Ask me anything. Bug report welcome.

It looks like AI slop. Is it AI slop?

Are you asking the author to validate your own opinion? Why don't you explain why you think its slop and provide some evidence to back up your assertions and we can have a real discussion.

No, I am asking the author whether it's AI slop.

As for evidence, sir, this is a wendys.

slop is such a poorly defined term that it's very hard to answer your question meaningfully. Is all code generated by AI slop? Many different opinions on this and questions to be answered as LLMs continue to shift the programming landscape.

Having said that, you could have just clicked the link and found https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen/commits/mai... with a bunch of commits by claude. It took longer to write this than it took to figure out whether AI was used.

Yeah, why do you think I said it looks like AI slop?

I think this criticism is very poor. Claude is competent and well suited for implementing a web browser.

I took a look at the code, it showed the usual tells for slop, hence my question.

Claude is well suited for many things, it does not mean that it never is used to generate slop.

Just read the linked Readme if you don't want to read the code, it's the usual slop.

Congrats on the journey. How did you implement the layouting engine? And how much of an effort did it take?

why not join up with https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird ?

Nordstjernen is a ~30 kLOC solo-built C browser aimed at being a small, hardened web reader for the text-heavy web, while Ladybird is a ~500 kLOC funded C++ project aiming to be a fully standards-compliant third browser engine alongside Blink, WebKit, and Gecko.

ok good answer. next q: why not team up with https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser and zig and make this both the small headless browser + a human one

Nordstjernen is a small, sandboxed, JIT-free GTK browser for humans to read the web; Lightpanda is a Zig-based headless V8 browser for AI agents to script it.

Good effort! Did you consider using Netsurf codebase ( https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ ) or contributing to it? (The website is outdated but the development is ongoing and active).

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