Northstar Browser 1.0.12 released!

Today, 2 October 2026, we are pleased to announce the release of Northstar 1.0.12. Northstar is the minimalist, free-software edition of the Nordstjernen project: a single-window, single-page, single-process desktop browser built from the same clean-room C engine, licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and is now on the Microsoft Store.

This page covers the four releases since 1.0.8: a new face for the browser in 1.0.9, a large layout, performance and security release in 1.0.10, the Microsoft Store package in 1.0.11, and in 1.0.12 an engine thread that no longer overflows its stack and a build on Fabrice Bellard’s original QuickJS.

Northstar Browser version 1.0.12 is available now as a source release. Read the full release notes here, or jump straight to the downloads.

It ships alongside Nordstjernen 1.0.28, the flagship built from the same engine.

« About the Northstar Browser · Back to nordstjernen.org

1.0.12 — 2 October

• Deep pages no longer crash. Pages run on the engine thread, which was created with the system’s default stack — 512 KB on macOS and 128 KB with musl. Around 200 nested <div> elements, or function f(){return f()}, overflowed it instead of being laid out or throwing RangeError. The engine thread now gets an 8 MB stack on every platform.
• The original QuickJS. Northstar can be built on Fabrice Bellard’s original QuickJS instead of quickjs-ng with -Djs_engine=quickjs. quickjs-ng stays the default; the API calls the original lacks are thin shims over its public API, and about:northstar names the engine in use.
• A note on the frames work. 1.0.12 also carried a standards-conformance backport for frames, messaging and event dispatch. Part of it was ported from contributions written for Nordstjernen under its source license, so it is withdrawn in the next release and those areas behave as in 1.0.11 until they are written anew for the GPL edition.

1.0.11 — 27 September

• Microsoft Store. The Windows package is built under the Northstar Browser product identity and published on the Microsoft Store.

1.0.10 — 26 September

• Less work per change. Text measurements outlive the layout rebuild, so a counter updating on a page of 400 cards takes 6.5 ms instead of 40. Animated images, canvas, video, scrolling and the caret repaint only what they change, blurred shadows are cached, and an idle page no longer costs a frame every 16 ms — a page with a 50 ms setInterval that made 443 frame requests in eight seconds now makes one.
• Layout. Flexible grid tracks honour their fixed minimums, spanning items size their tracks as the specification describes, the grid shorthands follow their grammar, align-content works on block containers, multi-column blocks split lists, and quirks-mode documents get the user-agent rules HTML lists.
• HTML. Popovers and invoker commands work as the HTML standard describes, a <summary> draws its triangle as a list marker, and <fieldset> and one-line text inputs get the rendering section’s default style.
• Security. A cross-origin frame can no longer read the embedding site’s images through a canvas, images a CDN serves with CORS no longer taint a canvas when requested with crossorigin, and a frame whose URL redirects to another site takes that site’s origin.

1.0.9 — 20 September

• A sunny about:start. The splash is redrawn as a flat, xkcd-style comic: animal pairs walk toward Noah’s ark, and at the head of the queue two little browser windows on stick legs wait their turn — “Two of each. Yes, even browsers.” Thirty-two frames animate the sun, the waves, the rocking ark and a whale surfacing to spout.
• A classic toolbar. The navigation toolbar is laid out like Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape Communicator, with icon-over-label buttons for Back, Forward, Reload, Stop, Home, Print, Downloads and Bookmarks.
• The address bar suggests as you type — bookmarks, history ranked by visits and recency, and a search row.
• Safer. Entering full screen shows a notice, so a page cannot pass off its own drawing of an address bar as the browser’s; after a crash the previous session is restored once and never in a loop; the audio mixer accepts only http(s):, data: and file: URLs; and ns-pango merges Pango 1.58.2 and builds with stack protectors and _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3.
• One calc() evaluator for the whole CSS engine, with typed math.

about Northstar

Free software. Northstar is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later — use it, read it, change it, share it.

One process, one page. All rendering happens in a single compact process, prioritizing auditability. On Linux it runs behind a Landlock filesystem sandbox (plus PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS) with a default-deny seccomp syscall filter. No JIT.

Standards-first. lexbor v3.0.1 for HTML/CSS, quickjs-ng v0.17.0 for JavaScript (or the original QuickJS), ns-pango for text, WAMR for WebAssembly, Wuffs for image decoding. No WebGL, no WebGPU, no AI-style web APIs, no telemetry.

Read the full Northstar documentation, or see the comparison of Nordstjernen and Northstar on the home page.

download

Latest tagged release: Northstar 1.0.12 — released 2 October 2026. full release notes »

Windows	Microsoft Store
Source	1.0.12.tar.gz · 1.0.12.zip
Linux binaries	The most recent prebuilt Linux packages — a portable zip, an AppImage and a Debian package — are from Northstar 1.0.7.
macOS	build from source with meson — see the build instructions
All releases	github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-browser/releases