Lightpanda

Lightpanda is a headless browser written from scratch in Zig for AI agents and automation work, rather than a fork of Chromium or a patch on WebKit. The saving it targets is the weight of driving a full desktop browser just to read pages: crawling 100 pages, the project measures 123MB of peak memory against 2GB for headless Chrome, and five seconds of execution against forty six.

Underneath sit v8 for JavaScript, html5ever for HTML parsing and libcurl for the HTTP loader, with DOM APIs, XHR, Fetch, cookies, custom headers, proxies, network interception and an adblocker layered on top.

Existing automation stacks can drive it directly.

• CDP server: a Chrome DevTools Protocol endpoint that Puppeteer and Playwright connect to through a websocket address.
• WebDriver BiDi: an alternative protocol that can be served alongside CDP from the same process.
• Dump modes: a fetch command returning HTML, Markdown, PNG or PDF, with several waiting strategies.
• Agent mode: plain English instructions that navigate, click, fill forms and extract data, exporting a replayable script that later runs with no model involved.
• MCP server: JSON-RPC over stdio or HTTP, where each connection gets its own page, cookies and memory.

Binaries come from Homebrew, the Arch User Repository, nightly releases for Linux and macOS or official Docker images. There is no native Windows build, so Windows users run it inside WSL. Telemetry is collected by default and switched off with an environment variable, and a flag makes the browser respect robots.txt.