Lightpanda — Headless Browser for AI & Automation Skill by [ara.so](https://ara.so) — Daily 2026 Skills collection Lightpanda is a headless browser built from scratch in Zig, designed for AI agents, web scraping, and automation. It uses 9x less memory and runs 11x faster than Chrome headless. Key facts: Not based on Chromium, Blink, or WebKit — clean slate Zig implementation JavaScript execution via V8 engine CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) compatible — works with Playwright, Puppeteer, chromedp Respects robots.txt via obey robots flag Beta status, actively developed License: AGPL 3.0 Installation macOS (Apple Silicon) Linux (x86 64) Docker CLI Usage Fetch a URL (dump rendered HTML) Start CDP Server This launches a WebSocket based CDP server for programmatic control. CLI Flags Flag Description obey robots Respect robots.txt rules log format pretty Human readable log output log level info Log verbosity: debug , info , warn , error host 127.0.0.1 Bind address for CDP server port 9222 Port for CDP server insecure disable tls host verification Disable TLS verification (testing only) Playwright Integration Start the CDP server, then connect Playwright to it: Puppeteer Integration Go (chromedp) Integration Python Integration Web Scraping Patterns Batch Page Fetching Extract Structured Data Docker Compose (with your app) Supported Web APIs Lightpanda supports (partial, expanding): DOM tree manipulation and querying JavaScript execution (V8) XMLHttpRequest (XHR) Fetch API Cookie management Network interception Proxy support Configuration Environment Variable Description LIGHTPANDA DISABLE TELEMETRY Set to true to opt out of usage metrics Performance Comparison Metric Lightpanda Chrome Headless Memory ~9x less Baseline Speed ~11x faster Baseline Binary size Small (Zig) Large (Chromium) Rendering No visual rendering Full rendering engine When to Use Lightpanda Use Lightpanda when: Running AI agents that need to browse the web Batch scraping at scale (memory/CPU savings matter) Automating form submissions and data extraction Running in containers where resources are limited You need CDP compatibility but not full visual rendering Use Chrome/Playwright instead when: You need pixel perfect screenshots or PDF generation You need full Web API coverage (Lightpanda is still partial) Visual regression testing Testing browser specific rendering behavior Building from Source Requires: Zig 0.15.2, Rust, CMake, system dependencies. Troubleshooting Connection refused on port 9222: Ensure ./lightpanda serve is running Check host 0.0.0.0 if connecting from Docker/remote Playwright script breaks after update: Lightpanda is beta — Playwright's capability detection may behave differently across versions Pin your Lightpanda version or use nightly consistently Missing Web API support: Check the [zig js runtime](https://github.com/lightpanda io/zig js runtime) repo for current API coverage File issues at [lightpanda io/browser](https://github.com/lightpanda io/browser/issues) Links GitHub: https://github.com/lightpanda io/browser Runtime APIs: https://github.com/lightpanda io/zig js runtime

lightpanda-browser