Customer sees a specific page pop up occasionally, seemingly when IT forces a browser restart for updates i.e for Glean Extension Plugin.
After a restart, i.e Plugin update, “this page” appears automatically in the browser.
Findings:- After the Glean browser extension is updated, the browser might briefly open a page with a URL like chrome://extensions/?id=cfpdompphacg...
This is the built‑in extensions details page for the Glean extension. The long string after id= is just the extension’s internal ID that Chrome uses to identify it. It’s expected behavior and doesn’t indicate any issue with your account or data.
Improvement Ideas -
ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT on New Tab Page during browser cold starts
Issue: Users on managed corporate laptops (using EDRs like CrowdStrike) may see a raw browser error (ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT) on the New Tab page after a forced restart. This happens because newtab.js attempts to load the app.glean.com/ntp iframe before the corporate proxy/security stack has fully initialized the network connection.
The Ask: Could the engineering team implement a more resilient loading strategy for the New Tab iframe? Specifically:
- Retry Logic: Add an
onerror listener or a timeout to the iframe. If it fails to load or stays blank, implement an exponential backoff to retry the setFrameUrl call. - Visual Fail-state: Instead of allowing a raw browser error page to show, provide a "Glean is waking up..." skeleton UI in the local
newtab.html while the iframe attempts its initial connection. - Service Worker Pre-warming: Trigger a "warm-up" fetch to
app.glean.com via the chrome.runtime.onStartup listener to ensure the network handshake is cleared by security agents before the first New Tab is opened.
