lightpanda-io/browser

The headless browser built from scratch for AI agents and automation.
Not a Chromium fork. Not a WebKit patch. A new browser, written in Zig.
16x lighter and 9x faster than Chromium.
 
Benchmarks
Requesting 933 real web pages over the network on a AWS EC2 m5.large instance.
See benchmark details.
| Metric | Lightpanda | Headless Chrome | Difference |
| :---- | :---- | :---- | :---- |
| Memory (peak, 100 pages) | 123MB | 2GB | ~16x less |
| Execution time (100 pages) | 5s | 46s | ~9x faster |
Quick start
Install
**Package Managers**
Latest nightly from Homebrew:
Latest nightly from Arch Linux User Repository:
**Download from the nightly builds**
You can download the last binary from the nightly
builds for
Linux and MacOS for both x86_64 and aarch64.
*For Linux*
Verify the binary before running anything:
Linux aarch64 is also available
> **Note:** The Linux release binaries are linked against glibc. On musl-based Linux distributions (Alpine, etc.) the binary fails with cannot execute: required file not found because the glibc dynamic linker is missing. Use a glibc-based base image (e.g., FROM debian:bookworm-slim or FROM ubuntu:24.04) or build from sources.
>
> **Android / Termux:** there is no native Android build. The Linux aarch64 binary needs the glibc loader (/lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1), which Android's Bionic libc does not provide, so it fails with the same cannot execute: required file not found error.
*For MacOS*
MacOS x86_64 is also available
*For Windows + WSL2*
Lightpanda has no native Windows binary. Install it inside WSL following the Linux steps above.
WSL not installed? Run wsl --install from an administrator shell, restart, then open wsl.
See Microsoft's WSL install guide for details.
Your automation client (Puppeteer, Playwright, etc.) can run either inside WSL or on the Windows host. WSL forwards localhost:9222 automatically.
**Install from Docker**
Lightpanda provides official Docker
images for both Linux amd64 and
arm64 architectures.
The following command fetches the Docker image and starts a new container exposing Lightpanda's CDP server on port 9222.
Dump a URL
You can use --dump markdown to convert directly into markdown, or
--dump png > page.png or --dump pdf > page.pdf for a text-only rendering
of the page.
--wait-until, --wait-ms, --wait-selector and --wait-script are
available to adjust waiting time before dump.
Start a CDP server
Once the CDP server started, you can run a Puppeteer script by configuring the
browserWSEndpoint.
Example Puppeteer script
Start a webdriver Bidi server
Use --protocol webdriver to enable Bidi support.
You can start both, CDP and Bidi, with --protocol webdriver --protocol cdp
Agent mode
lightpanda agent lets you drive the browser with a native agent. Describe what
you want in plain English or with slash commands, and it controls the browser:
navigating pages, clicking through flows, filling forms, extracting structured
data. Think of it as a robot you're directing to use the web, more than a
chatbot you're having a conversation with.
Because the agent runs inside the same process as the browser, every tool call
is a direct operation and you retain Lightpanda's speed and memory advantage.
The output of an agent session is a
PandaScript: vanilla JavaScript
with a small set of native browser primitives built directly into Lightpanda.
Run /save to export one from your current session, then replay it with
lightpanda run .js. Scripts are deterministic and token-free, so
you can prototype with the LLM and ship the output to production without a
model at runtime.
It supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Google Vertex AI, Mistral, Hugging
Face, the multi-lab gateways Vercel AI Gateway
and OpenRouter (one key for hundreds of models), any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via