Arora

» see arora-browser.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Benjamin C. Meyer started with the demo browser that shipped inside Qt, the one that existed to show off what the toolkit could render, and turned it into something people actually installed. He called it Arora and put it under the GPL. By 2009 it ran on BSD, Haiku, Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2 and Windows, and the Linux build weighed 1.2 megabytes.

The argument was that WebKit was already good and most of what surrounded it was weight. Arora was the engine with a location bar on top and very little else, and it had ad blocking working out of the box at a time when that was still an extension you had to go find. Lifehacker wrote it up in October 2009 for exactly that. Distributions kept it around as the browser you reach for when Firefox is too much machine.

In 2010 I was finishing university and my browser was whatever the laptop came with, which meant Firefox and then Chrome. Arora lived in a smaller world than that, the one where you pick a browser because it starts instantly on a machine with half a gigabyte of memory. I understood the appeal of that world without ever needing to live in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what he built ~

The feature list reads like a checklist somebody actually finished. Tabs, bookmarks, history, a location bar that searched as you typed, OpenSearch, session restore, private browsing, a download manager, a WebInspector, AdBlock. No sync service, no account, no store. It did the things a browser does and then stopped adding things.

That restraint is why it kept getting packaged. Arora was never going to take share from anybody, and it did not need to. It was the reference answer to a question people kept asking in the late 2000s, which was whether a browser could be built by one person in a reasonable amount of code now that the engine was solved.

~ what really happened ~

Meyer worked at Torch Mobile, which made the Iris browser for Windows Mobile. Research In Motion bought Torch Mobile in August 2009, largely for the WebKit knowledge it needed to put a real browser on BlackBerry. What came with that purchase was an employment contract, and the contract is what killed Arora.

Version 0.11.0 shipped on 27 September 2010 and nothing followed. On 20 June 2011 Meyer posted to the arora-dev list under the subject "Retirement from Arora". He wrote that being forbidden from contributing to Qt, and not being allowed to develop any feature that did not already exist in another browser, meant the fun of Arora was zapped. He offered the GitHub and Google Code accounts to anyone willing to take them, and said that without new leadership the project would stay frozen where it was.

~ the long tail ~

Nobody took the offer the way he meant it, so the code forked instead. Bastien Pederencino turned it into zBrowser, which became Zeromus Browser and later BlueLightCat. Aaron Dewes forked it again in 2020 as Endorphin Browser. Meyer himself merged a Korean translation patch into the repository in July 2017, six years after retiring, and that is the last commit anybody made to the tree.

The domain arora-browser.org answers in 2026, but not with Arora. Something else sits there now selling open-source browsing for privacy and developers, wearing a name whose author walked away fifteen years ago. For dead projects that is a far more common ending than the fork is.

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