Author here. The browser is made from scratch (not based on Chromium/Webkit), in Zig, using v8 as a JS engine.

Our idea is to build a lightweight browser optimized for AI use cases like LLM training and agent workflows. And more generally any type of web automation.

It's a work in progress, there are hundreds of Web APIs, and for now we just support some of them (DOM, XHR, Fetch). So expect most websites to fail or crash. The plan is to increase coverage over time.

Happy to answer any questions.

The hello world example does not work. In fact, no website I've tried works. It's usually always panics. For the example in the readme, the errors are:

```

./lightpanda-aarch64-macos --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9222

info(websocket): starting blocking worker to listen on 127.0.0.1:9222

info(server): accepting new conn...

info(server): client connected

info(browser): GET https://wikipedia.com/ 200

info(browser): fetch https://wikipedia.com/portal/wikipedia.org/assets/js/index-2...: http.Status.ok

info(browser): eval script portal/wikipedia.org/assets/js/index-24c3e2ca18.js: ReferenceError: location is not defined

info(browser): fetch https://wikipedia.com/portal/wikipedia.org/assets/js/gt-ie9-...: http.Status.ok

error(events): event handler error: error.JSExecCallback

info(events): event handler error try catch: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'length')

info(server): close cmd, closing conn...

info(server): accepting new conn...

thread 5274880 panic: attempt to use null value

zsh: abort ./lightpanda-aarch64-macos --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9222

```

I think this is a really cool project. Scrapping aside, I would definitely use this with playwright for end2end tests if it had 100% compatibility with chrome and ran with a fraction of the time/memory.

At my company we have a small project where we are running the equivalent of 6.5 hours of end2end tests daily using playwright. Running the tests in parallel takes around half an hour. Your project is still in very early stages, but assuming 10x speed, that would mean we could pass all our tests in roughtly 3 min (best case scenario).

That being said, I would make use of your browser, but would likely not make use of your business offering (our tests require internal VPN, have some custom solution for reporting, would be a lot of work to change for little savings; we run all tests currently in spot/preemptible instances which are already 80% cheaper).

Business-wise I found very little info on your website. "4x the efficiency at half the cost" is a good catch phrase, but compared to what? I mean, you can have servers in Hetzner or in AWS and one is already a fraction of the cost of the other. How convenient is to launch things on your remote platform vs launch them locally or setting it up? does it provide any advantages in the case of web scrapping compared to other solutions? how parallelizable is it? Do you have any paying customers already?

Supercool tech project. Best of luck!

If I don't need JavaScript or any interactivity, just modern HTML + modern CSS, is there any modern lightweight renderer to png or svg?

Something in the spirit of wkhtmltoimage or WeasyPrint that does not require a full blown browser but more modern with support of recent HTML and CSS?

In a sense this is Lightpanda's complement to a "full panda". Just the fully rendered DOM to pixels.

(This was on the frontpage as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42812859 but someone pointed out to me that it had been a Show HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42430629, so I've made a fresh copy of that submission and moved the comments hither. I hope that's ok with everyone!)

Pretty cool. Do you have a list of features you plan to support and plan to cut? Also, how much does this differ from the DOM impls that test frameworks use? I recall Jest or someone sporting such a feature.

Interesting. Looks really neat! How do you deal with anti bot stuff like Fingerprintjs, Cloudflare turnstile, etc? Maybe you’re new enough to not get flagged but I find this (and CDP) a challenge at times with these anti-bot systems.

what do you think would be the use cases for this project? being lightweight is awesome but usually you need a real browser for most use cases. Testing sites and scraping for example. It may work for some scraping use cases but I think that if the site uses any kind of bot blocking this is not going to cut it.

How does this work because the browser needs to render a page and the vision model needs to know where a button is, so it still needs to see an image. How does headless make it easier?

So is this the scraper we need to block? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42750420

An open-source browser built from scratch is bold. What inspired the development of Lightpanda?

Why didn't you just fork Chromium and strip out the renderer? This is guaranteed to bitrot when the web standards change unless you keep up with it forever and have perpetual funding. Yes, modifying Chromium is hard, but this seems harder.

I have a meta question from browsing the repo: Why do C, C++, and Zig code bases, by convention, include a license at the top of every module" IMO it makes more sense to insetead include of an overview of the module's purpose, and how it fits in with the rest of the program, and one license at the top-level, as the project already has.

I'm interested to see if this could be made to work as a drop-in replacement for the headless Chromium that Hoarder uses to archive web content. I don't have a problem with the current Hoarder solution, but it would be nice to use something that requires less RAM.

Another browser in this space is https://ultralig.ht/, it's geared for in-game UI but I wonder how easy it would be to retool it for a similar use case.

Why AGPL? I am not blaming you. I am just curious about the reasoning behind your choice.

The second social media botters find this.

Very cool project, congrats guys!

How does it do against captchas?

This is pretty neat, but I have to ask; Why does everyone want to build and/or use a headless browser?

When I use pyautogui and my desktop chrome app I never have problems with captchas or trigger bot detectors. When I use a "headless" playwright, selenium, or puppeteer, I almost always run into problems. My conclusion is that "headless" scrapping creates more problems than it solves. Why don't we use the chrome, firefox, safari, or edge that we are using on a day to day basis?