Windows browser-use external navigation fails when Codex helper bin path is missing

What happened?

On Windows Codex Desktop, @browser-use could bootstrap the IAB backend and create/list tabs, but external navigation failed before loading the page.

The failure occurred on tab.goto("https://example.com/") during the authenticated site-status check:

failed to start codex app-server: The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3)

Local navigation to http://127.0.0.1:<port>/ worked, so the browser backend itself was alive. External navigation was blocked by the host/app-server helper path used by nodeRepl.fetch.

Environment

• OS: Windows
• Codex Desktop package path: OpenAI.Codex_26.422.3464.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0
• Codex app-server: 0.125.0-alpha.3
• browser-use: 0.1.0-alpha1
• System Node after update: v24.15.0
• node_repl.exe: app-packaged binary

Investigation

There were two separate problems.

1. Initially, node_repl resolved old system Node:

Node runtime too old for node_repl (resolved C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.exe): found v22.14.0, requires >= v22.22.0

Updating system Node to v24.15.0 fixed node_repl startup.

1. After Node was fixed, external navigation still failed with:

failed to start codex app-server: The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3)

The desktop process had this path on PATH:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenAI\Codex\bin

But that directory did not exist.

The actual helper binaries existed under the packaged app cache:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\OpenAI.Codex_2p2nqsd0c76g0\LocalCache\Local\OpenAI\Codex\bin

That directory contained:

codex.exe
node_repl.exe
node.exe
rg.exe
codex-command-runner.exe
codex-windows-sandbox-setup.exe

After mirroring those helper binaries into the expected %LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenAI\Codex\bin path, browser-use external navigation worked.

Verification after workaround

@browser-use successfully:

1. Bootstrapped with setupAtlasRuntime({ backend: "iab" })
2. Created/listed an IAB tab
3. Navigated to https://example.com/
4. Read the DOM/title
5. Clicked the single anchor on the page
6. Navigated to https://www.iana.org/help/example-domains

Expected behavior

Codex Desktop should either:

• create/populate %LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenAI\Codex\bin, if that path is expected to be on PATH, or
• put the actual packaged helper bin path on PATH, or
• have node_repl/nodeRepl.fetch resolve the helper from the packaged app location directly.

browser-use external navigation should not fail with os error 3 when the app-server is already running and the IAB backend is active.

Notes

The issue is easy to miss because local browser navigation works. The failure only appears on external URLs because browser-use performs a remote site-status check through nodeRepl.fetch.