Reported issues for DOMShell

Pod holds 17 of 21 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded entirely — a maintainer's release checklist is not a warning to a prospective user.

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Most discussed

Playwright/Puppeteer backend

Alternative to the Chrome extension for headless agent workflows.

Use Playwright or Puppeteer as the browser automation backend instead of the Chrome debugger API.

From roadmap: Platform

Read the thread · 2026-02-08 · open · 6 comments

MCP server: confirmAction can deadlock the Node event loop in non-TTY parents

Symptom

When the MCP server is launched without `--no-confirm` from a non-interactive parent (Claude Desktop, Cursor, any GUI MCP client), a `tier === "write"` command can deadlock the entire Node.js event loop instead of producing a clear deny.

Root cause

`confirmAction` (mcp-server/index.ts:85) attempts to read user input via:

```typescript const fd = openSync("/dev/tty", "r+"); writeSync(fd, prompt); const bytesRead = readSync(fd, buf, 0, 10, null

Read the thread · 2026-05-26 · closed · 3 comments

feat(extension): honor initial_url for group_id="new" — eliminate about:blank placeholder on lane creation

Goal

Eliminate the about:blank placeholder tab that gets created on group_id="new" lane creation when the agent already knows the URL it wants to start at. Make the fresh lane's working tab navigate directly to the target URL.

Background

Today, group_id="new" triggers createAgentLane() → groupNew(["agent"]) which calls chrome.tabs.create({ url: "about:blank", active: false }) to get a tab Chrome will let us group. Then the agent's first open <url> call creates a second t

Read the thread · 2026-06-17 · closed · 2 comments

feat(extension): drop eager groupNew on SESSION_START — connection-default lane should only exist if explicitly requested via group_id="new"

Goal

Stop the eager groupNew(["agent"]) call in the WS bridge's SESSION_START handler. The connection-default lane (the Chrome tab group with one about:blank tab, titled 🐚 agent) that's currently auto-created on every MCP initialize should not exist. Isolation should happen only when the agent explicitly requests it via group_id="new".

Why this is the right fix

A QA-UX integrator team reported that orphan agent tab groups accumulate across connection cycles — unattribu

Read the thread · 2026-06-20 · closed · 1 comment

createAgentLane silently swallows groupNew failure — group_id="new" can return no [lane:] marker with no error

Symptom

domshell_execute with group_id="new" sometimes returns a successful command result with no [lane: ...] marker and no error. The agent has no signal that their requested isolated lane was never created — they just see the command output and have no handle to rejoin.

Observed during 2.0.2 validation cycle (cowork agent and Claude Desktop, multiple times).

Root cause

src/background/index.ts:192

Read the thread · 2026-06-01 · closed · 1 comment

Stdio MCP disconnect leaves auto-assigned lanes orphaned

Symptom

In stdio MCP mode, every connection auto-creates a lane (`mcp:`) on `SESSION_START`. When the client disconnects, the lane stays around — by design — so HTTP MCP clients can reconnect with the same session id and rejoin their lane.

For stdio MCP, every connection is genuinely fresh — there's no reconnect case. A wrapper that opens a fresh `ClientSession` for each call (the canonical pattern when the agent doesn't want long-lived MCP state, e.g., HKUDS/CLI-Anything's n

Read the thread · 2026-05-29 · closed · 1 comment

Document continue-on-error semantics of multi-line domshell_execute

What needs documenting

`mcp-server/index.ts:1115-1127` — when `domshell_execute` receives multi-line input, the splitter runs each line in sequence and does not halt on error:

```typescript for (const line of lines) { if (lines.length > 1) out.push(`$ ${line}`); const r = await execWithSecurity(line, sidRef.sid, lane); out.push(r.result); laneId = r.laneId; if (lane === "new" && r.lane

Read the thread · 2026-05-27 · closed · 1 comment

js / eval can hang the MCP call when the expression returns a non-resolving Promise

Symptom

`js ` and `eval ` (same kernel function under the hood) can hang indefinitely if the user's expression returns a Promise that never resolves — or if the expression triggers a page-level deadlock (broken navigation, beforeunload that waits on something, infinite loop in a handler).

[x]

[Read the thread](https://github.com/apireno/DOMShell/issues/27) · 2026-02-08 · open · 0 comments

### Switch MCP server from stdio to SSE/Streamable HTTP transport

## Problem

The current MCP server uses stdio transport, meaning it must be spawned as a child process by a single MCP client (e.g. Claude Desktop). This means:
- Only one client can use it at a time (Claude Desktop OR Claude CLI, not both)
- Server lifecycle is tied to whichever client spawned it
- Each client needs its own config entry

## Solution

Switch to SSE (Server-Sent Events) or Streamable HTTP transport:
- MCP server runs as a standalone long-lived HTTP server on `localhost:9876/mcp`

[Read the thread](https://github.com/apireno/DOMShell/issues/26) · 2026-02-08 · open · 0 comments

### Standalone headless browser mode

Ship DOMShell as a self-contained headless Chromium process (via Chrome for Testing or embedded Chromium) that agents launch directly.

- No extension install, no user Chrome profile
- `npx domshell --headless` and connect via MCP
- Ideal for CI pipelines, server-side automation, and agent-in-a-loop workflows

From roadmap: **Platform**

[Read the thread](https://github.com/apireno/DOMShell/issues/23) · 2026-02-08 · open · 0 comments

The remaining reports are on [the project's issue tracker](https://github.com/apireno/DOMShell/issues).