Lightpanda Browser

Overview

Lightpanda is a browser built from scratch for automation, not a Chromium fork. It runs JavaScript (V8), loads pages over libcurl, builds a DOM, and speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) and WebDriver BiDi, so Puppeteer and Playwright can connect to it. It does not lay out or paint pages. The project reports about 16x less memory and 9x faster execution than headless Chrome on a 100-page crawl; treat that as a vendor benchmark and measure your own sites.

Version 1.0.0 (2 October 2026) has five subcommands: fetch (load URLs and dump them), serve (CDP/BiDi server), mcp (MCP server over stdio or HTTP), agent (an LLM-driven browsing REPL) and run (replay a saved script, no LLM). Older guides use a bare lightpanda --host ... --port ...; use serve instead.

Instructions

Install

Packages first, then a checksum-verified binary:

brew install lightpanda-io/browser/lightpanda        # macOS / Linux, tracks the nightly build

Release assets are listed with their SHA-256 on the GitHub release page. Verify before running: