Thanks for the feedback, we will try to make this clearer on the website. Lightpanda works with Playwright, and we have some docs[1] and examples[2] available.
Web APIs and CDP specifications are huge, so this is still a work in progess. Many websites and scripts already work, while others do not, it really depends on the case. For example, on the CDP side, we are currently working on adding an Accessibility tree implentation.
Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation
It might works if you need to handle a few websites. But this retro engineering approach is not maintainable if you want to handle hundreds or thousands of websites.
Thank you! Happy if you use it for your e2e tests in your servers, it's an open-source project!
Of course it's quite easy to spin a local instance of a headless browser for occasional use. But having a production platform is another story (monitoring, maintenance, security and isolation, scalability), so there are business use cases for a managed version.
It was my first idea. Forking Chromium has obvious advantages (compatibility). But it's not architectured for that. The renderer is everywhere. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it did look more difficult to me than starting over.
And starting from scratch has other benefits. We own the codebase and thus it's easier for us to add new features like LLM integrations. Plus reducing binary size and startup time, mandatory for embedding it (as a WASM module or as C lib).
Yes but WebKit is not a browser per se, it's a rendering engine.
It's less resource-intensive than Chrome, but here we are talking orders of magnitude between Lightpanda and Chrome. If you are ~10x faster while using ~10x less RAM you are using ~100x less resources.
Bot protection of course might be a problem but it depends also on the volume of requests, IP, and other parameters.
AI agents will do more and more actions on behalf of humans in the future and I believe the bot protection mechanism will evolve to include them as legit.
We did not run benchmarks with chrome-headless-shell (aka the old headless mode) but I guess that performance wise it's on the same scale as the new headless mode.