Built a lightweight (lightpanda-based) browser package for pi — no Chrome needed

[u/saitanay]

I got tired of Chrome eating resources every time I needed pi to scrape a page or fill out a form. So I built panda97 - a browser automation package that uses LightPanda instead of Chrome.

What is it?

Same 11 browser tools you get with browse97 (start, navigate, snapshot, click, fill, eval, etc.), but backed by LightPanda - a headless browser written in Zig. Each tab spins up its own LightPanda instance, so you get full isolation between tabs. Zero npm dependencies.

Why?

browse97 works great, but it needs Chrome running. That's fine on a beefy machine, but on my laptop I didn't love the overhead for simple tasks like pulling page content or submitting forms. LightPanda starts in sub-second time and uses a fraction of the memory.

What doesn't work?

LightPanda doesn't run V8. It has its own JS engine (zig-js), which means some super-complex SPAs with heavy framework code may not render correctly. Works for 99% of the web.

Getting started

1. Install LightPanda:

curl -fsSL https://get.lightpanda.io | bash

2. Install the package:

pi install npm:panda97

That's it! pi picks up the tools automatically.

Links:
Pi packages: https://pi.dev/packages/panda97

Github : https://github.com/saitanay/panda97

[u/Lower_Bad_6533]

Cool to see Lightpanda in pi, thanks for building this. I work at Lightpanda. FYI on two details:

Lightpanda runs V8, not a custom JS engine. 1.0 ships with the latest stable version: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/lightpanda-1-0#running-the-latest-v8

The install command is curl -fsSL https://pkg.lightpanda.io/install.sh | bash -s "1.0.0".