Lightpanda

We benchmarked AI-native headless browsers built from scratch. Lightpanda vs Obscura vs Moli vs Cloudflare’s Kitesurf. We’re 8,000+ commits ahead of the newer ones. But that means nothing if it doesn’t perform. We measured speed, memory, CPU and web API support. Link to methodology in comments.

Lightpanda agent runs on Le Chonk from Mistral 🧡 The Mona Lisa has seen many things, but not this. lightpanda agent \ --provider mistral \ --model mistral-large-4 \ --task "go to collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/5335... and extract the title, date and dimensions in cm as JSON"

Lightpanda 1.0.1 is out > Its MCP server and agent now load stylesheets by default, so menus and modals stay hidden for the model > Web Locks, Compression Streams and RSA-OAEP in Web Crypto > zstd via libcurl 8.23. setImmediate is gone > Each MCP HTTP session now runs on its own thread

Agents using Lightpanda now read a page the way a person sees it. On npr.org: > The page went from 1,710 lines to 566 > 132 KB to 48 KB The site’s stylesheets load by default, so anything hidden on screen stays hidden. Fewer tokens and less noise to reason through. github.com/lightpanda-i...

Jev and Lightpanda are getting on well. Jev decides, Lightpanda clicks. We sent them to browse SF hostels with parking on a startup budget 🍜 > 129 agents fit on one laptop vs 12 with Chrome > 11x less memory than Chrome > 6.7s per task with Jev vs 14.1s with gemini-3.8-flash Code in comments

@typesafeai.bsky.social

Puppeteer or Playwright users: every job you run starts up a full copy of Chrome in the background. It takes seconds to boot and is heavy on memory. They weren't built for this. That's why we built PandaScript, the same way we built the browser. lightpanda.io/blog/posts/p...

Lightpanda 0.4.1 is out > CORS support, --experimental-features cors to opt in > nth-* selectors ~140x faster > native ad-blocker regex + request engine > --strip-mode for cleaner content extraction > Full click pointer/mouse sequence + real wheel scroll > --locale and --timezone

Lightpanda clicks and scrolls like a real browser now. A click fires the full pointer/mouse sequence, so menus that open on mousedown open, and the wheel scrolls the viewport. 🐭📜 Code in comments github.com/lightpanda-i... github.com/lightpanda-i...

📣 Python users, you can just pip install lightpanda. The browser ships in the wheel. Same 100 quotes off a JavaScript-rendered page: > Selenium and Chrome need 1121 MB > Lightpanda needs 39 MB lightpanda.io/docs/guides/...

Lightpanda speaks WebDriver BiDi. It is early. > Demo is Selenium's Python client. > Lightpanda serves BiDi and CDP off the same port and picks the driver from the path. > Enable bidi with --protocol webdriver. Pass both --protocol webdriver --protocol cdp. > We'd love to hear what's missing.

Lightpanda 0.4.0 is out > Breaking: iframes and workers no longer load by default (restore with --load-resources iframe and --load-resources worker) > New Web APIs inc URLPattern, navigator.geolocation and WorkerNavigator More in comments github.com/lightpanda-io/browser/releases/tag/0.4.0

> --http-header sets headers on every request, and --http-version 1.1 pins the connection > PDF and PNG output: --dump pdf and --dump png render the page's markdown, so text and structure rather than a pixel match. Same for Page.printToPDF and Page.captureScreenshot over CDP

Asked Lightpanda's agent for an open source headless browser that isn't a Chromium fork. It searched with Exa, opened the top result and read the release and stars off the page. Exa joins Brave and Tavily as a search backend. github.com/lightpanda-i...

1.64m passing wpt tests, up 33k from yesterday. Shadow DOM work: Element.getHTML() and node tracking across shadow roots >>> github.com/lightpanda-i... One web API at a time.

Lightpanda's HTTP cache now takes a --http-cache-entry-limit flag, default 1000. Cap how many responses persist, and it evicts the oldest by stored time once the cache is full (0 means no limit). Code >>> gist.github.com/katie-lpd/6b...

Lightpanda has an SQLite HTTP cache now. Point it at a cache dir and responses persist across runs, revalidating with ETag when stale. Same fetch twice here, the second served from SQLite. Code --> gist.github.com/katie-lpd/b8...

Grouped dropdowns now work in Lightpanda. Every <option> inside an <optgroup> used to be invisible to .options, .value and form submission. It reads them all now, matching the HTML spec.

Lightpanda now respects CSS @layer priority, so the cascade resolves the way modern stylesheets expect. github.com/lightpanda-i...