Nordstjernen, Northstar, Southstar: minimalist webbrowsers in C and Rust

Nordstjernen Web Browser Nordstjernen is a web browser, written from scratch in C, focused on supporting the HTML and CSS standards. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with builds for Android, FreeBSD, NetBSD and the JVM. Nordstjernen is built in Norway. Nordstjernen Sol Explorer version 1.0.40 released! Shared Web Workers, ElementInternals for form-associated custom elements, real popups that talk to their opener, documents, hardware VP9, AV1 and HEVC decoding through GStreamer, H.264 preferred wherever the operating system decodes it, an optional memory-safe Rust IPC parser, and a run of frame, CORS and cookie security fixes. More info here. Northstar Browser version 1.0.20 released! Video decoded by the operating system by default — Media Foundation on Windows, GStreamer on Linux — fonts loaded through the FontFace API, YouTube and Media Source fixes from Nordstjernen Sol, and security fixes for module-import CORS, cached security headers, HttpOnly cookies and frame sandboxing. About Northstar · More info here. Southstar Browser version 1.0.6 released! The Rust version of Nordstjernen now plays MP4 and H.264 video on Windows through Media Foundation, with fixes for iframe event realms and HttpOnly cookies. About Southstar · More info here. HTML Standard. Behaviour is measured against the spec text, section by section, not against another browser — 141 spec rows fully implemented, 31 partial and 0 absent across WHATWG HTML sections 1–16. No element or API row is fully absent any more: every one is implemented, partial, or a deliberate non-goal. Against the Web Platform Tests (October 2026) it passes 91.5% of the html/, dom/, url/ and related subtests (151,974 of 166,164) and 73.2% of the css/ subtests (110,540 of 151,048), and QuickJS passes 82,243 of the 82,248 test262 tests it runs. See docs/HTML-compatibility.md. Secure. Process-per-tab design — each tab runs in its own sandboxed renderer process, talking to the UI over IPC and shared-memory tiles. The renderer runs under seccomp + Landlock on Linux, a Seatbelt profile on macOS, and process mitigation policies on Windows · no JIT, in either the JavaScript or the WebAssembly engine. Minimalism. The core engine is about 245,000 lines of project C and headers, excluding the vendored libraries and generated assets — small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. Capable. JavaScript on QuickJS (an in-tree quickjs-ng fork with Temporal, the full Intl API and decorators in the engine, or Fabrice Bellard’s original QuickJS) with Canvas 2D, WebCrypto, Streams, Service Workers and the Navigation API · WebAssembly via WAMR’s fast interpreter · WebGL 1 & 2, and WebGPU on by default since 1.0.31 · inline