HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

katiehallett

21 karma · joined October 11, 2024

Cofounder @ Lightpanda.io
submissionscomments
katiehallett··on Systems Programming with Zig
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817439
katiehallett··on Show HN: Lightpanda, an open-source headless browser in Zig
Thanks! The three of us worked together at our former company - ecomm saas start up where we spent a ton of $ on scraping infrastructure spinning up headless Chrome instances.

It started out as more of an R&D thesis - is it possible to strip out graphical rendering from Chrome headless? Turns out no - so we tried to build it from scratch. And the beta results validated the thesis.

I wrote a whole thing about it here if you're interested in delving deeper https://substack.thewebscraping.club/p/rethinking-the-web-br...

katiehallett··on Show HN: Lightpanda, an open-source headless browser in Zig
Thanks! Right now no, but since we use the CDP (playwright, puppeteer), I guess it would be possible to support it
katiehallett··on Show HN: Lightpanda, an open-source headless browser in Zig
Headless mode skips the visual rendering meant for humans, but the DOM structure and layout still exist, allowing the model to parse elements programmatically (e.g. button locations). Instead of 'seeing' an image, the model interacts with the page's underlying structure, which is faster and more efficient. Our browser removes the rendering engine as well, so it won't handle 100% of automation use cases, but it's also what allows us to be faster and lighter than Chrome in headless mode.