No Chromium fork: a Zig-built headless browser runs 16x lighter and 9x faster than Chromium across 933 real pages
Lightpanda released a headless browser written from scratch in Zig for AI agents and automation, rather than a Chromium fork or a WebKit patch. In a benchmark requesting 933 real web pages over the network on an AWS EC2 m5.large instance, it is reported as 16x lighter and 9x faster than Chromium. It exposes a CDP server that existing Puppeteer and Playwright clients connect to, and a fetch command that dumps HTML, Markdown, PNG, PDF or structured data directly.