Codex in-app browser and Chrome extension wait ~30s on `ab.chatgpt.com` timeouts before normal navigation succeeds

What issue are you seeing?

The Codex in-app browser can open normal websites in my restricted-network environment, but browser operations repeatedly stall when ambient Statsig requests to ab.chatgpt.com are blocked or otherwise unreachable.

At least from my perspective, this is common in restricted client workspaces, including SME environments encountered by FDEs and centrally controlled enterprise networks.

For example, opening https://react.dev with the Codex in-app browser eventually succeeded:

{
  "url": "https://react.dev/",
  "title": "React",
  "ms": 30354
}

During that operation, the browser stack logged two 10s failures:

ERROR [Statsig] POST https://ab.chatgpt.com/v1/initialize?... Timeout of 10000ms expired.
ERROR [Statsig] POST https://ab.chatgpt.com/v1/rgstr?... Timeout of 10000ms expired.

So this is no longer a hard blocker, but it still adds noticeable delay to ordinary in-app browser work.

I also reproduced the same timeout pattern through the Codex Chrome extension path: opening https://react.dev succeeded, but tab.goto() took about 32s and logged the same two ab.chatgpt.com Statsig timeouts.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Use Codex App in an environment where direct access to ab.chatgpt.com is blocked—for example, by enterprise-managed endpoint security or DLP software—and the endpoint is reachable only through a locally running HTTP(S) proxy.
2. Use the Codex in-app browser or the Codex Chrome extension.
3. Navigate to a normal external page, for example https://react.dev.
4. Observe that the page eventually loads, but the browser-control operation takes around 30s before it completes.

When reproduced through Codex's browser-plugin runtime, the tool output shows the delay corresponds to ab.chatgpt.com Statsig timeout failures.

What is the expected behavior?

Ambient browser-stack requests such as Statsig initialization/event logging should not delay normal in-app browser or Chrome extension operations when the target page itself is reachable.

Possible fixes could be:

• make the related fetch path respect configured proxy settings, or
• make those ambient requests non-blocking / timeout-isolated from user-requested browser actions.

Additional information

This looks like the residual form of #23504: the browser stack is no longer fully blocked, but ab.chatgpt.com failures still add delay. It may also share the root cause of #22623, where the Node helper fetch path does not honor proxy settings.

Still reproducible in:

• ChatGPT App: 26.707.31428 (5059)
• Browser plugin: 26.707.31428
• Platform: macOS