"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."
A proprietary web browser allows investments and allocating resources to browser development where the funds go towards the browser development. The browser source code rights are protected and owned by the developer. This model is honest and transparent.
The alternative is the Google Chrome model where the users are constantly under surveillance and advertising monitoring, which is worse overall, in my opinion.
> written in C, in 2026.
C is a wonderful programming language which people understand and which is portable to most platforms.
I am making this web browser, ask me anything. I have two GitHub accounts, one for private and another for work. I am using Claude to make this web browser. I live in Norway now, I used to live in Qatar before.
GTK 4 completely overhauled its rendering pipeline. It finally ditched the old CPU-bound Cairo rendering in favor of a modern scene graph (GSK) that natively leverages OpenGL and Vulkan.
This browser is C, while Qt needs C++ normally. Maybe I will make my own toolkit, like the Chrome Aura.
Nordstjernen is a small, sandboxed, JIT-free GTK browser for humans to read the web; Lightpanda is a Zig-based headless V8 browser for AI agents to script it.
Nordstjernen is a ~30 kLOC solo-built C browser aimed at being a small, hardened web reader for the text-heavy web, while Ladybird is a ~500 kLOC funded C++ project aiming to be a fully standards-compliant third browser engine alongside Blink, WebKit, and Gecko.
Yes, I might change this back to 2 years, I am still thinking about the right balance between a free web browser and a commercial software product which will generate revenue.
@andreasrosdal