Lightpanda — Headless Browser for AI & Automation

Lightpanda is a headless browser built from scratch in Zig, designed for AI agents, web scraping, and automation. It uses 9x less memory and runs 11x faster than Chrome headless.

Key facts:

• Not based on Chromium, Blink, or WebKit — clean-slate Zig implementation
• JavaScript execution via V8 engine
• CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) compatible — works with Playwright, Puppeteer, chromedp
• Respects robots.txt via --obey_robots flag
• Beta status, actively developed
• License: AGPL-3.0

Installation

macOS (Apple Silicon)

curl -L -o lightpanda https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser/releases/download/nightly/lightpanda-aarch64-macos
chmod a+x ./lightpanda