Lightpanda Browser

Active
GitHub Zig AGPL-3.0

Description

A lightweight browser runtime designed for automation and scraping scenarios, offering lower overhead than traditional browsers for headless tasks.

Key Features

  • Built from scratch — Not a Chromium/WebKit fork; headless browser written entirely in Zig
  • Ultra-low resource usage — 123MB peak memory vs Chrome's 2GB; 5s for 100 pages vs Chrome's 46s (9x faster)
  • CDP compatible — Chrome DevTools Protocol support; works directly with Puppeteer and Playwright
  • Native MCP server — Built-in MCP JSON-RPC 2.0 server for AI agent browser tool integration
  • URL fetch & Markdown conversion — --dump html/markdown mode to fetch pages and convert directly to Markdown
  • robots.txt compliance — --obey-robots flag to respect website crawling rules

Use Cases

💡 Large-scale web crawling and data collection, replacing Chrome to reduce resource consumption
💡 Provide browser tools for AI agents via MCP protocol to enable web browsing capabilities
💡 Automated testing with Puppeteer/Playwright using a lighter browser backend
💡 Extract structured data from web pages for training data preparation or information aggregation
💡 Run browser automation tasks in resource-constrained environments like edge devices

Tags

headless-browser automation web-agent

Categories

🌐 Browser Agent

Quick Start

# macOS install
brew install lightpanda-io/browser/lightpanda

# Fetch a page and convert to Markdown
lightpanda fetch --dump markdown https://example.com

# Start CDP server
lightpanda serve --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9222
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