Lightpanda
Dev tools
headless browser
SHOW HN2025
319points
137comments
#159of 3,837 in 2025
Top 5%of 2025 by points
How HN took it
CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments
6 positive, 32 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 13 critical, out of 53 comments about the project. Thread score -0.11.
Idea: 1 for, 5 againstDesign: 1 for, 2 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Interesting project and cool tech
From 2 comments
I think this is a really cool project. Scrapping aside, I would definitely use this with playwright for end2end tests if it had 100% compatibility with chrome and ran with a…
psanchez on HNVery cool project, congrats guys!
randomMatrix101 on HN
Objections
Many websites fail or crash; the hello world example panics
From 2 comments
The hello world example does not work. In fact, no website I've tried works. It's usually always panics. For the example in the readme, the errors are: ```…
frankgrecojr on HNAuthor here. The browser is made from scratch (not based on Chromium/Webkit), in Zig, using v8 as a JS engine. Our idea is to build a lightweight browser optimized for AI use…
fbouvier on HN
RAM savings may not hold on real-world websites
From 2 comments
When I've talked to people running this kind of ai scraping/agent workflow, the costs of the AI parts dwarf that of the web browser parts. This causes computational cost of the…
JoelEinbinder on HNThe benchmark shows lower ram usage on a very simple demo website. I expect that if the benchmark ran on a random set of real websites, ram usage would not be meaningfully lower…
JoelEinbinder on HN
AI costs dwarf browser costs, so browser efficiency matters little
From 1 comment
When I've talked to people running this kind of ai scraping/agent workflow, the costs of the AI parts dwarf that of the web browser parts. This causes computational cost of the…
JoelEinbinder on HN
Bot detection and captchas may block it
From 3 comments
Interesting. Looks really neat! How do you deal with anti bot stuff like Fingerprintjs, Cloudflare turnstile, etc? Maybe you’re new enough to not get flagged but I find this (and…
gwittel on HNHow does it do against captchas?
stuckkeys on HNwhat do you think would be the use cases for this project? being lightweight is awesome but usually you need a real browser for most use cases. Testing sites and scraping for…
zlagen on HN
Requests
Robots.txt compliance and throttling by default
From 1 comment
Please put a priority on making it hard to abuse the web with your tool. At a _bare_ minimum, that means obeying robot.txt and NOT crawling a site that doesn't want to be…
bityard on HN
Better web API coverage
From 2 comments
The most important "feature" is to increase our Web APIs coverage :) But of course we plan to add others features, including - tight integration with LLM - embed mode (as a C…
fbouvier on HNAuthor here. The browser is made from scratch (not based on Chromium/Webkit), in Zig, using v8 as a JS engine. Our idea is to build a lightweight browser optimized for AI use…
fbouvier on HN
Selenium support
From 1 comment
does this work with selenium/chromedriver?
867-5309 on HN
Support for puppeteer-extra stealth plugin
From 1 comment
Very nice. Does this / will this support the puppeteer-extra stealth plugin?
dtj1123 on HN
Questions
Which JS engines were considered and why V8
From 1 comment
Great job! And good luck on your journey! One question: which JS engines did you consider and why you chose V8 in the end?
sesm on HN
Does it work on Linux
From 1 comment
Does it work nicely on Linux? I'm very curious about this
msoad on HN
How it handles anti-bot systems
From 1 comment
Interesting. Looks really neat! How do you deal with anti bot stuff like Fingerprintjs, Cloudflare turnstile, etc? Maybe you’re new enough to not get flagged but I find this (and…
gwittel on HN
Alternatives named
Chrome headless
From 2 comments
The benchmark shows lower ram usage on a very simple demo website. I expect that if the benchmark ran on a random set of real websites, ram usage would not be meaningfully lower…
JoelEinbinder on HNI think this is a really cool project. Scrapping aside, I would definitely use this with playwright for end2end tests if it had 100% compatibility with chrome and ran with a…
psanchez on HN
WebKit via Playwright
From 1 comment
Playwright can run webkit very easily and it's dramatically less resource-intensive than Chrome.
nwienert on HN
Camoufox and SecretAgent
From 1 comment
How well does it compare to specialized headless scraper browsers, like camoufox (firefox based) or secret agent (chrome based)? Either should reduce your ram usage compared to…
bdhcuidbebe on HN
QuickJS-based Elinks
From 1 comment
How about using QuickJS instead of full-blown V8? For example, Elinks has support for SpiderMonkey, QuickJS, MuJS: https://github.com/rkd77/elinks/blob/master/doc/ecmascript.txt…
niutech on HN