Are you fed up with all rotten Headless browsers who transform your servers into radiators and your cloud in nightmare? Well that’s good because there is a newcomer in the field of web automation: Lightpanda.

When you think of web automation and scraping, Chrome Headless is obvious but using a full desktop browser for automation tasks is like taking a tank to kill a fly. And it is for these reason that Lightpanda Was invented because instead of reusing existing components, the team behind this project left zero.

She developed a minimalist browser in Zig (a low level programming language optimized for performance) specially designed for automation and the result is final:

SCR 20250127 Mihp

  • An execution 11 times faster that chrome
  • A memory imprint 9 times lighter
  • An almost instant start -up

But as you tried to explain, in vain, to your partner, one evening of Valentine’s Day, Performance does not do everything. Indeed, to be really usable, a headless browser must easily integrate into our existing workflows. This is why Lightpanda developers have implemented compatibility with industry standards such as the CDP protocol (Chrome Devtools Protocol), compatibility with Playwright And Puppeteer and support for essential web APIs (Ajax, XHR, Fetch & Mldr;).

Now to test Lightpanda, nothing could be simpler. Download the latest version from night builds (available for Linux X86_64 and MacOS Aarch64) like this:

wget https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser/releases/download/nightly/lightpanda-x86_64-linux

chmod a+x ./lightpanda-x86_64-linux

And then, you can use this browser either in Fetch mode to quickly recover the contents of a page, or in CDP server mode for automation via Puppeteer/Playwright

Fetch mode with content dump:

./lightpanda-x86_64-linux --dump https://lightpanda.io

CDP server mode:

./lightpanda-x86_64-linux --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9222

SCR 20250127 MIPX

The lightness and speed of Lightpanda thus opened the way to many scenarios of use:

  • 🤖 IA agents : Give your agents the ability to interact with the web without slowing down their execution
  • 🔍 Large -scale scraping : Collect data on hundreds of pages simultaneously
  • 🧪 Automated tests : Accelerate your end-tond test tests
  • 🔄 Web automation : Transform any site into a programmable API

And although Lightpanda is still in beta phase, the project is advancing rapidly thanks to an active community. Moreover, the documentation is clear and the team readily welcomes the return and contributions of the community.

And don’t forget: each Headless chrome instance replaced by Lightpandathey are so many resources saved and lightened cloud invoices.

Thank you to Lorenper for this great discovery that will do good to our servers!

Source


Source link

Categorized in:

Technology