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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-29)

  • Simon Willison evaluated webframe, a lightweight Go-based headless browser-JavaScript runner by Jeff Lindsay, as a potential tool for web scraping and sandboxing, comparing its capabilities to his own shot-scraper.
  • webframe operates by running a web page like a program in a hidden headless web view, leveraging system browsers (WKWebView, WebKitGTK, WebView2) via the glaze library, which allows it to avoid bundling its own browser engine and remain a “much smaller package” than Playwright-dependent tools.
  • The evaluation, conducted by Claude Opus 5.5, found webframe to be fast and lightweight with scraping performance comparable to shot-scraper, but noted “important rough edges” including CSP failures, a 0x0 viewport, hanging loads, missing HTTP metadata, and limited browser controls.