lightpanda-io/browser
A from-scratch headless browser in Zig that's 16x lighter and 9x faster than Chromium.
A headless browser built from scratch in Zig rather than forked from Chromium or WebKit, aimed at AI agents and automation. On a published benchmark of 933 real pages on an AWS m5.large instance, it used 123MB of peak memory against Chrome's 2GB and finished in 5 seconds against Chrome's 46 — roughly 16x lighter and 9x faster. It ships CDP on port 9222 so existing Puppeteer or Playwright clients work unchanged, with native binaries for Linux and macOS (x86_64 and aarch64) plus Docker images.
What holds up
- +123MB peak memory vs Chrome's 2GB on the published 933-page benchmark — about 16x lighter
- +5 seconds vs Chrome's 46 on the same benchmark — about 9x faster
- +Speaks CDP on port 9222, so existing Puppeteer or Playwright code runs unchanged
- +Can dump a page straight to markdown, PNG, PDF or structured JSON-LD/OpenGraph data from the CLI
Mind the limits
- −No native Android build — the Linux binary fails on Termux because Bionic lacks the glibc loader
- −No native Windows binary — Windows users must run it inside WSL2
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