Simon Willison reviews webframe's scraping and sandboxing
What happened
On 27 October 2026, Simon Willison published a review of webframe, a lightweight browser JavaScript runner built by Jeff Lindsay on Go and the glaze library. The review finds its scraping performance on par with shot-scraper, but notes several problems: CSP failures, a 0×0 viewport, loading hangs, missing HTTP metadata and limited browser control.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 3 h ago
Timeline
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- Simon Willisonwebframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox
Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden headless web view and outputs console.log() to standard output and any exceptions to standard error.
Heat of this event
Current heat 7·Peak in the comparable range 8（Oct 27 10:00）·Change over 24 hours in the comparable range –
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