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Show HN: Lightpanda, an open-source headless browser in Zig

(github.com)
319 points fbouvier | 2 comments | 24 Jan 25 22:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

We’re Francis and Pierre, and we're excited to share Lightpanda (https://lightpanda.io), an open-source headless browser we’ve been building for the past 2 years from scratch in Zig (not dependent on Chromium or Firefox). It’s a faster and lighter alternative for headless operations without any graphical rendering.

Why start over? We’ve worked a lot with Chrome headless at our previous company, scraping millions of web pages per day. While it’s powerful, it’s also heavy on CPU and memory usage. For scraping at scale, building AI agents, or automating websites, the overheads are high. So we asked ourselves: what if we built a browser that only did what’s absolutely necessary for headless automation?

Our browser is made of the following main components:

- an HTTP loader

- an HTML parser and DOM tree (based on Netsurf libs)

- a Javascript runtime (v8)

- partial web APIs support (currently DOM and XHR/Fetch)

- and a CDP (Chrome Debug Protocol) server to allow plug & play connection with existing scripts (Puppeteer, Playwright, etc).

The main idea is to avoid any graphical rendering and just work with data manipulation, which in our experience covers a wide range of headless use cases (excluding some, like screenshot generation).

In our current test case Lightpanda is roughly 10x faster than Chrome headless while using 10x less memory.

It's a work in progress, there are hundreds of Web APIs, and for now we just support some of them. It's a beta version, so expect most websites to fail or crash. The plan is to increase coverage over time.

We chose Zig for its seamless integration with C libs and its comptime feature that allow us to generate bi-directional Native to JS APIs (see our zig-js-runtime lib https://github.com/lightpanda-io/zig-js-runtime). And of course for its performance :)

As a company, our business model is based on a Managed Cloud, browser as a service. Currently, this is primarily powered by Chrome, but as we integrate more web APIs it will gradually transition to Lightpanda.

We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Where should we focus our efforts next to support your use cases?

1. psanchez ◴[25 Jan 25 07:14 UTC] No.42820090[source]▶
I think this is a really cool project. Scrapping aside, I would definitely use this with playwright for end2end tests if it had 100% compatibility with chrome and ran with a fraction of the time/memory.

At my company we have a small project where we are running the equivalent of 6.5 hours of end2end tests daily using playwright. Running the tests in parallel takes around half an hour. Your project is still in very early stages, but assuming 10x speed, that would mean we could pass all our tests in roughtly 3 min (best case scenario).

That being said, I would make use of your browser, but would likely not make use of your business offering (our tests require internal VPN, have some custom solution for reporting, would be a lot of work to change for little savings; we run all tests currently in spot/preemptible instances which are already 80% cheaper).

Business-wise I found very little info on your website. "4x the efficiency at half the cost" is a good catch phrase, but compared to what? I mean, you can have servers in Hetzner or in AWS and one is already a fraction of the cost of the other. How convenient is to launch things on your remote platform vs launch them locally or setting it up? does it provide any advantages in the case of web scrapping compared to other solutions? how parallelizable is it? Do you have any paying customers already?

Supercool tech project. Best of luck!

replies(1): >>42820670 #
2. fbouvier ◴[25 Jan 25 09:57 UTC] No.42820670[source]▶
Thank you! Happy if you use it for your e2e tests in your servers, it's an open-source project!

Of course it's quite easy to spin a local instance of a headless browser for occasional use. But having a production platform is another story (monitoring, maintenance, security and isolation, scalability), so there are business use cases for a managed version.