# Long-Time Slashdot Reader Announces New Open Source Web Browser 'Northstar'
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 12:22:01 2026-10-04
Long-time Slashdot reader Andreas(R) announces Northstar, a "minimalist" web browser written entirely from scratch in C — now available in version 1.0.11:
One window, one page, one process — about 160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. It carries no upstream browser engine: no Gecko, no WebKit, no Blink. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and it runs on Linux, macOS and Windows...
Compliance is not inherited from an upstream engine; it is measured, section by section, against the specification text... Private by construction. No telemetry, no update pings, and no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs. Safe browsing checks a top-level navigation's host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before it is fetched — the check never leaves your machine. Cookies, storage and the cache are partitioned by origin.
It's logo reminds me of the old Netscape logo. (And I love the "Best viewed in..." GIF at the upper-right of its web site.)
[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/10/04/0127201/long-time-slashdot-reader-announces-new-open-source-web-browser-northstar?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 12:22:01 2026-10-04
Long-time Slashdot reader Andreas(R) announces Northstar, a "minimalist" web browser written entirely from scratch in C — now available in version 1.0.11:
One window, one page, one process — about 160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. It carries no upstream browser engine: no Gecko, no WebKit, no Blink. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and it runs on Linux, macOS and Windows...
Compliance is not inherited from an upstream engine; it is measured, section by section, against the specification text... Private by construction. No telemetry, no update pings, and no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs. Safe browsing checks a top-level navigation's host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before it is fetched — the check never leaves your machine. Cookies, storage and the cache are partitioned by origin.
It's logo reminds me of the old Netscape logo. (And I love the "Best viewed in..." GIF at the upper-right of its web site.)
[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/10/04/0127201/long-time-slashdot-reader-announces-new-open-source-web-browser-northstar?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.