public/browser
1
0
Fork 0
mirror of https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser.git synced 2025-10-29 07:03:29 +00:00
Code Issues Actions 4 Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Update README.md

Browse Source
This commit is contained in:
katie-lpd
2025-01-16 14:06:00 +01:00
committed by GitHub
parent 40c9355088
commit ee861c1f91
1 changed files with 48 additions and 48 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

96
README.md
View File

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ Lightpanda is the open-source browser made for headless usage:
- Support of Web APIs (partial, WIP)
- Compatible with Playwright, Puppeteer through CDP (WIP)
Fast scraping and web automation with minimal memory footprint:
Fast web automation for AI agents, LLM training, scraping and testing with minimal memory footprint:
- Ultra-low memory footprint (9x less than Chrome)
- Exceptionally fast execution (11x faster than Chrome) & instant startup
@@ -25,53 +25,6 @@ Fast scraping and web automation with minimal memory footprint:
See [benchmark details](https://github.com/lightpanda-io/demo).
## Why?
### Javascript execution is mandatory for the modern web
In the good old days, scraping a webpage was as easy as making an HTTP request, cURL-like. It’s not possible anymore, because Javascript is everywhere, like it or not:
- Ajax, Single Page App, infinite loading, “click to display”, instant search, etc.
- JS web frameworks: React, Vue, Angular & others
### Chrome is not the right tool
If we need Javascript, why not use a real web browser? Take a huge desktop application, hack it, and run it on the server. Hundreds or thousands of instances of Chrome if you use it at scale. Are you sure it’s such a good idea?
- Heavy on RAM and CPU, expensive to run
- Hard to package, deploy and maintain at scale
- Bloated, lots of features are not useful in headless usage
### Lightpanda is built for performance
If we want both Javascript and performance in a true headless browser, we need to start from scratch. Not another iteration of Chromium, really from a blank page. Crazy right? But that’s we did:
- Not based on Chromium, Blink or WebKit
- Low-level system programming language (Zig) with optimisations in mind
- Opinionated: without graphical rendering
## Status
Lightpanda is still a work in progress and is currently at a Beta stage.
:warning: You should expect most websites to fail or crash.
Here are the key features we have implemented:
- [x] HTTP loader
- [x] HTML parser and DOM tree (based on Netsurf libs)
- [x] Javascript support (v8)
- [x] Basic DOM APIs
- [x] Ajax
- [x] XHR API
- [x] Fetch API
- [x] DOM dump
- [x] Basic CDP/websockets server
NOTE: There are hundreds of Web APIs. Developing a browser (even just for headless mode) is a huge task. Coverage will increase over time.
You can also follow the progress of our Javascript support in our dedicated [zig-js-runtime](https://github.com/lightpanda-io/zig-js-runtime#development) project.
## Quick start
### Install from the nightly builds
@@ -271,3 +224,50 @@ Lightpanda accepts pull requests through GitHub.
You have to sign our [CLA](CLA.md) during the pull request process otherwise
we're not able to accept your contributions.
## Why?
### Javascript execution is mandatory for the modern web
In the good old days, scraping a webpage was as easy as making an HTTP request, cURL-like. It’s not possible anymore, because Javascript is everywhere, like it or not:
- Ajax, Single Page App, infinite loading, “click to display”, instant search, etc.
- JS web frameworks: React, Vue, Angular & others
### Chrome is not the right tool
If we need Javascript, why not use a real web browser? Take a huge desktop application, hack it, and run it on the server. Hundreds or thousands of instances of Chrome if you use it at scale. Are you sure it’s such a good idea?
- Heavy on RAM and CPU, expensive to run
- Hard to package, deploy and maintain at scale
- Bloated, lots of features are not useful in headless usage
### Lightpanda is built for performance
If we want both Javascript and performance in a true headless browser, we need to start from scratch. Not another iteration of Chromium, really from a blank page. Crazy right? But that’s we did:
- Not based on Chromium, Blink or WebKit
- Low-level system programming language (Zig) with optimisations in mind
- Opinionated: without graphical rendering
## Status
Lightpanda is still a work in progress and is currently at a Beta stage.
:warning: You should expect most websites to fail or crash.
Here are the key features we have implemented:
- [x] HTTP loader
- [x] HTML parser and DOM tree (based on Netsurf libs)
- [x] Javascript support (v8)
- [x] Basic DOM APIs
- [x] Ajax
- [x] XHR API
- [x] Fetch API
- [x] DOM dump
- [x] Basic CDP/websockets server
NOTE: There are hundreds of Web APIs. Developing a browser (even just for headless mode) is a huge task. Coverage will increase over time.
You can also follow the progress of our Javascript support in our dedicated [zig-js-runtime](https://github.com/lightpanda-io/zig-js-runtime#development) project.