katiehallett

Joined 2 years ago

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Oct 11

Cofounder @ Lightpanda.io

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Comment · 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817439

Comment · 1 year ago

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...

Comment · 1 year ago

Thanks! Right now no, but since we use the CDP (playwright, puppeteer), I guess it would be possible to support it

Comment · 1 year ago

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.