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On October 27, 2026, Simon Willison published a review of webframe. webframe was developed by Jeff Lindsay, is written in Go, and uses the glaze library to invoke the system browser; it does not need to bundle its own browser engine, and is a fast, lightweight browser JavaScript runner. The review shows that it is suitable for web scraping, with performance comparable to shot-scraper, but it has obvious problems such as CSP failures, a 0×0 viewport, loading hangs, missing HTTP metadata, and limited browser control. Willison completed this review after having Claude Opus 5.5 actually run it and build a prototype.
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Research: An evaluation of webframe as a scraping tool and sandboxDevelopments
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Simon Willison reviews webframe's scraping and sandboxing capabilities
Source:Simon Willison
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Oct 27
Simon Willison
Research: An evaluation of webframe as a scraping tool and sandbox
An evaluation of webframe shows that it is a fast, lightweight browser JavaScript runner suitable for web scraping, with performance comparable to shot-scraper, but it has notable issues such as CSP failures, a 0×0 viewport, loading hangs, missing HTTP metadata, and limited browser control. webframe was developed by Jeff Lindsay, is written in Go, and uses the glaze library to invoke the system browser without bundling its own browser engine. Simon Willison had Claude Opus 5.5 actually run it and build a prototype before completing this evaluation.