Hello Gard, I suggest that a web browser with a significantly smaller source code base is easier to maintain. A larger source code size is more difficult to understand, change, slower to compile and more difficult to maintain.
Today, Nordstjernen has about 0.46 million lines of code including its JavaScript engine (0.30 million without it) in a 0.011 GB tarball, against about 38.1 million in a 0.81 GB tarball for Firefox and 160.0 million in a 4.39 GB tarball for Chromium, depending on how one counts, but the main argument about source code size is clear. Please see "Lehman's laws of software evolution", which is about software evolution and software decay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_evolution Nordstjernen was implemented initially using Claude, in the "AI-era", while Firefox and Chrome has been implemented over a very long time, and accumulated software bloat, decay and is more complex to maintain, in my opinion. I hope you will be interested in helping getting this web browser into Debian, and that you see the value of having multiple web browsers working on the Internet, and also that an additional web browser is interesting research object for NTNU and Sintef. Sincerely, Andreas Røsdal man. 19. okt. 2026, 14:03 skrev Gard Spreemann <[email protected]>: > Could you elaborate on this herculean effort? Review alone, not to > mention testing and maintenance, seems beyond hard even if this were the > full time occupation of all four of you. > > > Best, > Gard > >
