Simon Willison’s Weblog
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 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 tool, albeit in a much smaller package that doesn't depend on Playwright.
I had Claude Opus 5.5 put it through its paces 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)
Recent articles
Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer - 20th October 2026
Hello Python 3.15, goodbye 3.10, and now I can use 3.11 - 12th October 2026
A new feature for my blog, built using my voice - 9th October 2026
Claude Haiku 5.5 - 7th October 2026
This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 26th October 2026 .
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