On 10/24/26 6:17 AM, Andreas Røsdal wrote:
Web browsers are an important piece of software, which is exactly why
there needs to be a variety of alternatives, and the current
Chrome+Firefox duopoly controlled by Google, an advertising corporation,
needs to be challenged by independent individuals.
For the Northstar variant we are transitioning from mostly AI
development, to mostly developed by humans in the traditional methods.
Nordstjernen Sol Browser and Southstar-browser are still programmed by
Claude mostly.
Glad to see the project, there needs to be "recent" competition in the
browser market. If a programmer can count and is competent to track and
free their allocations, C is no more inherently unsafe than any any
other language. If you are reading this on Linux, you are running on
vibe-coded C as we speak.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, frontier model coding agents can write
safe code better than most (not all) human programmers, for the same
reason they can create exploits well beyond the capabilities of most
hackers. But the code still needs review by an accomplished human
programmer. As good as they are, coding agents are not 100% reliable.
Like any other tool, they are only as good as the hands using them.
I would encourage the project development to use as few external
libraries as possible (some will be unavoidable). The less external
baggage the project has, the better. The more you can show, in both the
case of C and Rust, that a human has reviewed and validated each line of
code, the less uncertainty the project(s) will have to deal with.
With Mozilla attempting to hide more and more telemetry and ads in its
offerings, there is a real opportunity for a new browser to break
through and pick up users.
Good luck.
--
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
