Nordstjernen Browser 1.0.19 released!
Today, 17 July 2026, we are pleased to announce the release of Nordstjernen 1.0.19. This is a big one: a major push on web-standards conformance, a redesigned animated about:start splash, a fresh iOS port, and compatibility work that gets real-world sites much closer to loading. 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, iOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and the JVM. Nordstjernen is built in Norway.
Nordstjernen Browser version 1.0.19 is available now! Read the full release notes here, or jump straight to the downloads.
about:start page — the animated splash panorama. more screenshots »what’s new in 1.0.19
- A big step in web-standards conformance. Nordstjernen now runs the full Web Platform Tests (wpt-fast) tree headless — 88.4% of subtests pass overall (169,973 of 192,222), with the HTML suite at 91.7%, CSS at 63.4% and JavaScript at 59.5%. Hundreds of layout, CSS, DOM, events and HTML-reflection fixes landed this cycle, and QuickJS now runs the test262 ECMAScript conformance suite with an empty known-failure list.
- Getting real sites to load. Nordstjernen now presents a coherent modern Chrome desktop identity — a matching User-Agent,
Sec-CH-UAclient hints,navigator.plugins/mimeTypes,window.chromeand Chrome/ANGLE WebGL renderer strings — so sites that sniff the browser serve it the right code. A newcompat_modesetting switches between Chrome, Firefox and Ladybird identities. List of websites almost working, but not quite: Google, Bing, YouTube, duck.ai, CNN, BBC. - A new
about:start. The start-page splash is redesigned as an animated “civilization panorama” — a Greco-Roman skyline of world monuments under drifting clouds over a calm sea — replacing the old codename splash. The on-device search box and local-AI window carry over unchanged. - A fresh iOS port. A new UIKit host app and iOS engine cross-compile now build end-to-end in CI (device and simulator), joining Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, the JVM, FreeBSD and NetBSD.
- Sharper text. Text now renders with grayscale antialiasing instead of LCD subpixel, for cleaner glyphs across displays.
- Shadow DOM and more.
getHTML(),setHTMLUnsafe()and declarative shadow roots; real cross-frame and cross-threadpostMessage; CSS transforms reflected ingetBoundingClientRect()and hit-testing; real box-shadow blur; CSS-table cells and grid placement fixes; and much more.
HTML Standard. Behaviour is measured against the spec text, section by section, not against another browser — 140 spec rows fully implemented, 31 partial, 0 absent across WHATWG HTML sections 1–16 as of July 2026. See the standards table below and docs/HTML-compatibility.md.
Secure. Process-per-tab design — each tab's engine runs in its own sandboxed process (seccomp + Landlock on Linux), talking to the UI over IPC and shared-memory framebuffers · no JIT.
Minimalism. The whole engine is about 145,000 lines of clean-room C (plus a thin GTK 4 shell), excluding the vendored libraries — small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end.
Local AI. The about:start new-tab page is a chat with a small language model running entirely on your machine via llama.cpp — no cloud, no network at inference time. Build with -Dai=disabled for a fully offline binary.
Nordstjernen has no JIT so it is much more secure, and can still be fast enough. It ships no telemetry of any kind.
news
17 JUL 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.19 released — web-standards conformance, a new animated splash, and an iOS port. Release notes »
6 JUL 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.18 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
30 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.17 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
27 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.16 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
25 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.15 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
23 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.14 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
21 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.12 released — a maintenance release. Release notes »
19 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.11 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
18 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.10 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
17 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.9 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
15 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.8 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
14 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.7 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
14 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.6 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
13 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.5 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
13 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.4 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
10 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.3 released — faster page loads and a UI translated into 40 languages. Announcement » · Release notes »
9 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.2 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
7 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.1 released — a maintenance release. Announcement » · Release notes »
5 JUN 2026 · Nordstjernen 1.0.0 released — the first stable release. Announcement » · Release notes »
31 MAY 2026 · Nordstjernen 0.8.1 released. Release notes »
28 MAY 2026 · Nordstjernen 0.8.0 released. Release notes »
24 MAY 2026 · Nordstjernen 0.7.0 released. Release notes »
specifications
| language | C · ~145 kLOC clean-room · GTK 4 shell · Java/JVM binding via JNI · fully auditable |
|---|---|
| html / css | lexbor (parser, WHATWG URL, selectors) |
| javascript | quickjs-ng — bytecode interpreter, no JIT |
| webassembly | WAMR — interpreter behind the WebAssembly JS API |
| images | Wuffs v0.4 (PNG / GIF / BMP / JPEG) · libwebp (WebP) · libavif (AVIF, optional) |
| media | inline <video> — MPEG-1 via pl_mpeg · WebM (VP9/VP8 + Opus/Vorbis) via optional FFmpeg · WebVTT captions · SDL2 audio |
| ai | llama.cpp — on-device about:start chat · no cloud · optional GPU offload (Vulkan / Metal) · -Dai=disabled for offline builds |
| ui | GTK 4 (≥ 4.22.1 on Windows, ≥ 4.14 elsewhere) · Pango text shaping |
| network | libcurl ≥ 8.5 · HTTP/2 |
| hardening | process-per-tab · seccomp + Landlock sandbox on Linux · sandboxed renderer processes · no JIT |
| privacy | no telemetry · partitioned cookies · HSTS · CSP · SRI · on-device safe browsing |
| standards | 140 spec rows fully implemented, 31 partial, 0 absent · WHATWG HTML sections 1–16 · Web Platform Tests: 88.4% of subtests overall, 91.7% HTML (July 2026) |
| platforms | windows · macos · linux · android · ios · java/jvm · freebsd · netbsd |
| license | NSL-1.0 → MIT after 10 years |
download
Latest tagged release: Nordstjernen 1.0.19 — released 17 July 2026. full release notes »
Nordstjernen is also available on the Microsoft Store.
For platform-specific builds, use the nightly builds. They are rebuilt
from main each night and point at the latest code — bleeding
edge, expect rough edges.
| Windows | nordstjernen-windows-x86_64.zip · Microsoft Store |
|---|---|
| macOS | nordstjernen-macos.dmg |
| Debian | nordstjernen-debian-amd64.deb |
| Ubuntu | nordstjernen-ubuntu-amd64.deb |
| openSUSE | nordstjernen-opensuse-x86_64.rpm |
| Linux (portable) | nordstjernen-linux-x86_64.zip |
| Alpine (musl) | nordstjernen-alpine-x86_64.apk · .zip |
| Java API (JDK 21) | nordstjernen-java.jar · sources · javadoc · API docs |
| Source | nordstjernen-src.tar.xz |
| Checksums | SHA256SUMS · all nightly files |