Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Suddenly, launching new Chrome have no URL

My desktop flow have a Launching new Chrome action with a variable as "Initial URL". It was working for months. Suddenly it is not working recently.

In the desktop flow history screenshot, I can see the Chrome is opened but URL is blank. Therefore a blank browser is opened. Error is "Problem while executing action 'LaunchChrome'. Failed to assume control of Chrome. The negotiation with the native message host failed. The initial connection was successful, but during negotiation an error occured.."

When I try to troubleshoot it by remote in the VM, run the desktop flow manually, then it is working as expected.

What could be the problem?

This can happen because of issues with the browser extension.

Instead of launching a browser, try using Run application to launch the browser app (chrome.exe for Chrome) and pass the URL into the arguments field. Then use Launch new {browser} action to attach to the browser instead of launching a new instance. This works all the time without any issues. I have been using this approach for years, because Launch new Chrome was simply failing me inconsistently due to the extension loading too slowly on some machines. But running the app and then attaching to it has never failed.

I do it slightly differently than above, where I actually initially just open google.com via Run application, and then use Wait for window to wait for the page to load. I then attach to it and use Go to web page to navigate to the URL I need.

The flow looks more or less like this:

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