lightpanda-io/browser

A headless browser written from scratch in Zig, not a Chromium fork, designed specifically for AI agents and automation: it features a CDP interface compatible with Puppeteer / Playwright, includes an MCP server, and offers an agent mode that drives the browser using natural language.

2026-10-31T01:38:33Z

Stars 38399 (+626 / 24h)

Reasons

Officially claimed to process 100 real web pages on an AWS m5.large instance with peak memory usage of 123 MB and a duration of 5 seconds, compared to headless Chrome which uses 2 GB and takes 46 seconds
The agent mode lightpanda agent runs in the same process as the browser, handling navigation, clicking, form filling, and structured data extraction; sessions can be exported as PandaScript scripts via /save, allowing later replay with lightpanda run without calling the model again
MCP supports stdio or HTTP; in HTTP mode, each connection has its own page, cookies, and memory, allowing multiple agents to isolate or share the same session; fetch can directly convert web pages into Markdown or structured data

Usage

Install via brew install lightpanda-io/browser/lightpanda, or download Linux / macOS nightly binaries, or use the Docker image lightpanda/browser
Run ./lightpanda fetch --obey-robots --dump markdown <URL>; start a CDP service for Puppeteer connection with ./lightpanda serve; in MCP configuration, set command to lightpanda and args to ["mcp"]
Agent mode supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama, etc.; use --no-llm to enter a pure REPL

Risks

Telemetry is sent by default; disable it by setting LIGHTPANDA_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=true; there is no native Windows version (use WSL) or Android version, and the Linux binary requires glibc
It is not a full browser; web platform compatibility should be judged based on official WPT results; the license is AGPL-3.0, so caution is needed when embedding it into your own services; the repository has existed since 2023

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