General Discussion • Re: Nordstjernen web browser

Honestly, in 50kLOC C it's 100% impossible to write a current web browser engine. And just glancing at the repo confirms this. The 50kLOC seems to be primarily glue code, and then there's what's explicitly not supported:

No WebGL, WebGPU, WebRTC, WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebHID, WebMIDI. No service workers, web workers, push notifications, background sync, IndexedDB, EventSource. No MSE / EME / Widevine / DRM. (YouTube's player needs MSE and so isn't supported; direct WebM URLs play.) No JIT. (QuickJS is a bytecode interpreter — no patching, no inline caches, no W+X page at any point.) No per-site compatibility shims — the engine renders what the page sends. Sites that hard-require Blink/WebKit-only APIs degrade or fail. No extensions, no plugins, no NPAPI/PPAPI shims. No persistent browsing history — the back/forward stack lives only in memory. No sync, no accounts, no "studies", no telemetry of any kind. No localisation beyond English (for now). No tab strip.

No support for web workers will prevent the vast majority of web apps from running. No JIT (and pure interpreted JS without caching) means no acceptable performance. Not extensible... Single document only workflow makes this more akin to a webview.

I'd say it's at most a rudimentary online static document viewer, not a browser.

Gave it a spin in a sandboxed environment (because there's really very little known about the author or program) and it fell apart really quickly. One of the links on the start page was reddit. Clicked it and after about a minute there was nothing usable yet. Decided to go to skatteverket.se which is a very average website (Swedish tax office) and super-compatible with most browsers, and it failed to render properly and promptly hung up the application permanently (taskkill required). Tried a few more sites:

• imgur.com: hang, then crash to desktop
• www.palemoon.org: fails to render most of the site. menu non-functional. CSS support is abysmal. claimed support for @font-face and downloadable fonts aren't working. no proper image support, table rendering is broken, too.
• chatgpt (linked from home page): fails to render anything meaningful
• bbc news (linked from home page): no visible images, no functional navigation
• https://testserver.palemoon.org/dromaeo/ Crashes to desktop before even starting anything (just clicking to load recommended test framework)

I'd say this is very much not ready for anything and you were a bit premature making noise about it Of note: I tested the Windows version. It fares a lot worse than what you seemed to be achieving on your OS.