Field noteOct 27, 20261 min read1 source

webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox

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Simon Willison published an exploratory evaluation of webframe, a Go project by Jeff Lindsay that runs a web page or file in a hidden headless web view.

What changed: The story evaluates webframe for scraping and sandbox use, contrasting it with Simon Willison’s shot-scraper; the prior only covered a shot-scraper release.

It sends console.log() output to standard output and exceptions to standard error.

webframe is built on the glaze library and uses a system browser rather than bundling a browser engine: WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux, and WebView2 on Windows. Willison compares its intended scraping use to his shot-scraper JavaScript tool, while noting that webframe is a smaller package without a Playwright dependency.

For the evaluation, Willison asked Claude Opus 5.5 to run the project, build exploratory prototypes, and assess it as both a scraping tool and a potential sandbox. The source establishes that this was an exploratory assessment. It does not establish a formal security review, containment guarantees, resistance to sandbox escape, or suitability for executing untrusted code.

Evidence / sources

  1. 1simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/26/webframe-evaluation
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