The headless browser built from scratch for AI agents and automation, with native CDP and MCP protocol support.
Lightpanda Browser is a headless browser built entirely from scratch — not a fork of Chromium or WebKit — with its core engine developed in Zig. Benchmarks show approximately 9x faster execution (5s vs 46s) and 16x lower memory usage (123MB vs 2GB) compared to Headless Chrome across 933 real-world web pages.
Key features include: V8 JavaScript engine with snapshot precompilation for fast startup, html5ever HTML parser, Libcurl HTTP client, native CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) server implementation compatible with Puppeteer/Playwright, and native MCP (Model Context Protocol) support via stdio JSON-RPC 2.0 for AI agent framework integration.
Networking covers CORS, Ajax, XHR, Fetch API, custom headers, proxy, and request interception. DOM capabilities include tree construction, HTML/Markdown dump, form interaction, and cookie management. Multiple wait strategies are provided (event-based, timed, selector-based, script-based).
Supports Linux (x86_64/aarch64), macOS (x86_64/Apple Silicon), and Windows via WSL2. Available as a one-line install script, Docker image, npm package, or build-from-source (requiring Zig 0.15.2, Rust, etc.).
The project is in Beta with active development (5,800+ commits). Known limitations: only a subset of hundreds of Web APIs implemented with no full compatibility list published, no graphical rendering, and no native Windows support. Licensed under AGPL-3.0; commercial usage terms should be reviewed in the repository's LICENSING.md.