Codex browser control unavailable across secure browser, built-in Browser and Chrome
What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?
26.820.9563.0
What subscription do you have?
Business
What platform is your computer?
Windows & IOS
What issue are you seeing?
Every Codex browser route is failing.
The ChatGPT Work secure browser repeatedly enters recovery and cannot reliably create, list, navigate or interact with tabs. The latest exact errors are:
CDP operation refresh tabs was superseded by browser recovery
CDP operation refresh tabs timed out after 20000ms
The built-in Browser fails with:
Browser is not available: iab
Backend discovery found no registered in-app Browser backend.
The Chrome extension detects and reads my authenticated tab but provides no interactive control. Codex cannot click, edit, save, run tests or download files.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Feedback ID: 01a04594-5a75-71e1-8c7b-c99783482f69
What is the expected behavior?
Codex should reliably create, list and navigate tabs and provide interactive browser control through at least one supported browser route.
Additional information
Start a Codex Work chat and request a browser task.
The secure browser enters recovery and tab discovery times out.
Start a fresh conversation and clean browser session. The failure continues.
Attempt the documented recovery procedure. It does not resolve the fault.
Request the built-in Browser. It returns Browser is not available: iab.
Use Chrome with the Codex extension. Codex can read the page but cannot interact with it.
The app, browser and extension have been restarted or reinstalled roughly ten times.
I pay thousands of pounds annually for a Business subscription. These failures have persisted for several days, blocked live production work and wasted many hours.
Chats also fail to synchronise reliably with the Chrome side panel, long-running tasks repeatedly stall, and scheduled tasks have returned generic failure messages.
Please escalate this to engineering. Further instructions to reinstall or repeat the same recovery steps are not a resolution.
3 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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Unable to use the browser from codex on latest build here too.
Browser control tool available: undefined
agent unable to browse. I opened. I've quit and restarted. No change.
I’m seeing a very similar issue on Windows with ChatGPT Business.
Codex App version:
26.825.31414
Powered by Codex & OWL
My built-in browser opens and Codex receives the current URL through ambient browser state, but no callable browser-control or CDP tools are exposed.
In Settings I can see:
“In-app browser plugin unavailable”
Codex cannot access:
I also see under Computer Use → Google Chrome:
“Disabled by your organization or unavailable in your region.”
The inconsistent part is that the browser UI itself still opens and Codex can see the current URL, but the interactive browser backend/capability is missing.
I have already:
This looks related to the same browser backend/runtime discovery issue described here, rather than a local configuration problem.