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lightpanda-io
browser
Zig2024–2026
lightpanda-io / browser

browser

Lightpanda: the headless browser designed for AI and automation

Web DevelopmentAI & Machine LearningAutomation & Workflows
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
42KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Lightpanda: the headless browser designed for AI and automation

GitHub

Where it is used

  • kinbrowser — ❌ Not a new browser engine (use Lightpanda for that — kinbrowser uses it as Layer 2 backend) Source

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2024-12-16 13:06:22 UTC to 2026-05-15 18:43:51 UTC.

01232024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsAug 20252025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsMay 2026

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC321
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20252025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20252025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20252025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20252025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20252025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20252025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20252025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20262026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Apr 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20262026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

7 sources
fbouvier·Jan 24, 2025Submission

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

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 ru
Read the rest
ntime (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?
319 points · Open discussion
fbouvier·Jan 9, 2025
Hey Anirudh, Stagehand looks awesome, congrats. Really love the focus on making browser automations more resilient to DOM changes. The act, extract, and observe methods are super clean. You might want to check out Lightpanda (https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser). It's an open-source, lightweight headless browser built from scratch for AI and web automation. It's focused on skipping graphical rendering to make it faster and lighter than Chrome headless.
In Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI
fbouvier·Dec 16, 2024Submission

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

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 ru
Read the rest
ntime (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?
7 points · Open discussion

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