Slow Attachment and Frequent Disconnects

[ivalsaraj]

Issue: Playwriter Extension Slow Attachment and Frequent Disconnects

Description:

It has been observed since day one that attaching the Playwriter Chrome extension takes a noticeable amount of time. While the page being attached does contain many elements and dynamic states, the Playwriter extension appears to be particularly slow.

In contrast, the "open claw browser relay" Chrome extension, when attached to a similar page, functions without issue.

Problem:

The Playwriter extension is experiencing:

• Slow attachment times.
• Frequent disconnects.

Question:

Is it possible to compare the performance of Playwriter with other extensions like "open claw browser relay" to diagnose and resolve these issues?

I am not sure whether we can compare it with openclaw.

[remorses]

What website was slow?

The extension will show as loading until you start using the cli/MCP and the extension can connect with the websocket relay

[ivalsaraj]

1. It's app.crisp.chat, it's chat handling app (like intercom)

2. also sometimes it shows like this:

Additional Info:

[remorses]

Try restarting Chrome, the error you saw happens when the extension source code was modified or tampered, could have been an agent or anti virus

[tyler-dot-earth]

@remorses How can I provide logs/feedback?

• I cannot get Playwriter to connect reliably
• I have also experienced the "corrupted" issue above
  • on a Linux machine -- high confidence that there was no interferences from agents or antiviruses.

Asked an agent to debug a bit; it looked at ~/.playwriter/cdp.jsonl and said:

The issue is clear from the logs. The extension keeps connecting and disconnecting rapidly, and critically: tabs map is always empty ("tabs":{"dataType":"Map","value":[]}). The extension connects but reports 0 enabled tabs, so Playwright has no pages to work with.

The extension is cycling through disconnects/reconnects repeatedly.

I've tried:

• fully uninstalling/reinstalling the extension
• fully uninstalling/reinstalling the npm dependency
• updating and restarting chrome
• clicking the browser extension and waiting
• resetting/deleting sessions

But cannot get 1 session to connect reliably.

➡️ What can I do to help debug further?

EDIT: more info..

• after reinstalling the extension, chrome-extension://pebbngnfojnignonigcnkdilknapkgid/src/welcome.html opens and i briefly see the content before the whole tab/page content is gray and never loads again.
• also seeing the tab group name and such not appearing until after i 'collapse' and 'expand' the group... the tab outline is green but the color block is white and unlabeled until after expansion.
  

[tyler-dot-earth]

@remorses Managed to get my first reliable session of the day with Playwriter.

I cloned the repo locally and built + installed unpacked extension, then had an agent debug.

Here's what it said fixes were:

1. I fixed CDP child-session detach handling in the extension relay logic in extension/src/background.ts. Specifically, Target.detachFromTarget now resolves the child sessionId from params.sessionId (the shape Playwright actually sends), maps it to the parent tab via childSessions, and no-ops unknown child sessions instead of throwing.
2. That removed the recurring relay error (No tab found for method Target.detachFromTarget ...) that was showing up right before your earlier Frame has been detached failures, and after this change page.goto(...) became stable.
3. I rebuilt the unpacked extension from sourc, so generated output in extension/dist/background.js matches source (not hand-edited drift).
4. I also added tab-group styling retries/paint nudges in extension/src/background.ts, but this appears cosmetic only; it did not correlate with command reliability.

Practical Bottom Line

The core reliability fix was the Target.detachFromTarget session routing change.
The tab-group gray/unlabeled chip behavior is annoying UI paint behavior, but not what was breaking Playwriter execution.

[remorses]

@tyler-dot-earth thank you for diving deeper into the issue, can you open a PR with the changes the agent made so I can take a look? You can ask your agent to use the gh cli to do so

[tyler-dot-earth]

@tyler-dot-earth thank you for diving deeper into the issue, can you open a PR with the changes the agent made so I can take a look? You can ask your agent to use the gh cli to do so

here's what it changed - #59

[remorses]

Hey @tyler-dot-earth — I just pushed a fix for the detach/session routing issue plus related stability updates.

Could you try again with the latest code and reload the extension to see if it works on your Linux setup now?

After reloading, please retry your previous flow and share whether the connect/disconnect loop is gone.

[tyler-dot-earth]

@remorses seems like it's reliably connecting 🎉 thank you very much for addressing this so quickly.

fwiw the only thing that's a little 'odd' (but not functionally blocking) now is the "tab group name and such not appearing until after i 'collapse' and 'expand' the group... the tab outline is green but the color block is white and unlabeled until after expansion" - is that intentional? worth opening an issue over?