A browser rewritten for AI agents: not a Chromium fork, claimed 16x lighter and 9x faster across 933 real pages
Lightpanda released a headless browser written from scratch in Zig for AI agents and automation, not 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 claims to be 16x lighter and 9x faster than Chromium. It exposes a CDP server that existing Puppeteer and Playwright clients connect to, and runs in fetch and serve modes.