webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox

Simon Willison published a research evaluation of webframe, Jeff Lindsay's Go tool built on the glaze library that runs a web page like a program in a hidden headless web view, outputting console.log() to standard output and exceptions to standard error. Willison had Claude Opus 5.5 test webframe against the patterns of his own shot-scraper javascript command and assess it both as a sandboxing tool and as a web scraping tool, noting webframe is a much smaller package that does not depend on Playwright. The evaluation matters as a comparison point for lightweight, system-browser-based alternatives to Playwright-driven scraping.

Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox https://github.com/simonw/research/tree/main/webframe-evaluation readme webframe https://github.com/tractordev/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. It's written in Go on top of the glaze https://github.com/crgimenes/glaze library, which provides access to a system browser "WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux, WebView2 on Windows" so it doesn't need to bundle its own browser engine. It reminds me of my own shot-scraper javascript https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/en/stable/javascript.html tool, albeit in a much smaller package that doesn't depend on Playwright. I had Claude Opus 5.5 put it through its paces https://claude.ai/code/cshk 01MX3aJH8vDGmGSj1xH9BYhj2HviVvLDaJbiELHyDoReYT and prepare a research report for me. Here's the prompt I used: Explore https://github.com/tractordev/webframe try running it and put it though its paces, build a few exploratory prototypes, then evaluate it as a potential sandboxing tool and as a tool for scraping web pages using the same patterns encouraged by the "shot-scraper JavaScript" command see simonw/shot-scraper on GitHub, docs directory Tags: browsers https://simonwillison.net/tags/browsers , go https://simonwillison.net/tags/go , javascript https://simonwillison.net/tags/javascript , jeff-lindsay https://simonwillison.net/tags/jeff-lindsay , shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net/tags/shot-scraper