Lightpanda — lightweight headless browser

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Lightpanda is an open-source headless browser built from scratch in Zig, designed specifically for AI agents and web automation. Reach for it when Chromium chews through memory running hundreds of pages in a crawler, when you need a lightweight browser backend for an AI pipeline, or when you want Puppeteer or Playwright scripts to run without shipping a full Chromium install. According to the project's own benchmarks across 933 real pages on AWS EC2: peak memory is 16× lower than Headless Chrome (123 MB vs 2 GB) and execution time is 9× faster (5 s vs 46 s). Not a Chromium fork — written entirely in Zig. Supports CDP and WebDriver BiDi, so existing Puppeteer and Playwright scripts connect with minimal changes by pointing browserWSEndpoint at the local CDP server. The CLI can dump pages as HTML, Markdown, PNG, or PDF. Distributed as prebuilt binaries for Linux (x86_64/aarch64) and macOS, via Homebrew, AUR, and an official Docker image exposing port 9222; no native Windows binary — use WSL2. Not suitable for musl-based Linux distributions (Alpine) without building from source, and has no headed/GUI mode. Use only on systems you own or are authorized to crawl, respecting robots.txt.