Cloud browser handoff freezes, tab switching fails, and session cannot be truly reset

Open 💬 2 comments Opened Aug 21, 2026 by nitin587
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Summary

The ChatGPT Work/Codex cloud-browser handoff became unusable during a simple authenticated website workflow. The model could open and inspect pages, but the user-facing browser panel froze, tab switching failed, and attempts to recover created fresh tabs inside the same malfunctioning browser rather than a genuinely reset session.

Observed behavior

  1. Opened two sites in the cloud browser.
  2. User could initially see the browser panel but could not switch between tabs.
  3. Closing one tab and leaving the other did not restore control.
  4. The side panel then froze.
  5. Creating a fresh tab and reopening the site still reused the affected browser instance.
  6. Only one browser instance was exposed, so there was no true session reset or replacement.
  7. Login/session handoff that had reportedly worked for the same user two days earlier was no longer usable.
  8. The agent had no integrated mechanism to submit a diagnostic report automatically after repeated browser failures.

Expected behavior

  • Reliable tab selection in the user-visible browser panel.
  • A true "reset browser session" action that replaces the underlying browser instance.
  • Preserved handoff/login continuity where supported.
  • Automatic detection of repeated tool/handoff failures.
  • A privacy-scrubbed, one-click diagnostic submission flow that returns a tracking/session ID.

Impact

Two explicitly authorized customer-service workflows could not be completed. The model correctly analyzed the tasks, but browser authentication/handoff failures reduced the workflow to manual instructions and caused substantial user frustration.

Privacy

No account credentials, personal financial details, transaction amounts, names, or private session content are included in this report.

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 6 days ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

  • #39295

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tgromysz · 4 days ago

I may have found a reliable trigger for this issue.

During Cloud Browser Take Over, everything works normally until I resize/enlarge the browser panel. Immediately after resizing, the user-facing browser becomes unresponsive and keyboard/input interaction stops working.

Reproduces 100% for me on both Brave and Firefox. Brave Shields and Firefox uBlock are disabled, with identical behavior in both browsers.

Steps:

Open authenticated website in Cloud Browser
Take Over
Confirm typing/clicking works
Resize/enlarge browser panel
Browser interaction immediately stops working

Windows / ChatGPT Plus / August 24, 2026.