This page presents the most frequent reasons for which the UiPath Extension for Microsoft Edge might not work properly, and how to solve these issues.

The ChromeNativeMessaging.exe enables communication between the UiPath Extension for Edge and the UiPath Studio/Robot.

The ChromeNativeMessaging.exe process runs under the current user and it uses cmd.exe to start the browser.

If the ComSpec environment variable is missing or has an invalid value, then Microsoft Edge cannot launch the ChromeNativeMessaging.exe.

Furthermore, the administrator may disable the command prompt for some users or configure it to always run with elevated privileges.

Manually add the correct value for the ComSpec environment variable. This variable is set at Windows installation and must be set to: %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe.

If the ComSpec environment variable is set correctly but the problem persists, the user may not have permission to run the command prompt. In this case, the ChromeNativeMessaging.exe process cannot be started with cmd.exe running under the current user.

Starting with Chromium 120.0.6090+, a NativeHostsExecutablesLaunchDirectly Group Policy allows admins to turn this on for users in restricted environments (Cloud PCs that forbid cmd.exe, for example).

By default, the extension is not granted access to File URLs or InPrivate mode. To enable these:

UiPath Extension for Microsoft Edge does not support automating multiple browser instances running with multiple user profiles at the same time. Therefore, browser automation requires you to close all active instances of Microsoft Edge and restart the browser using a single user profile.

In some cases, Microsoft Edge background processes prevent it from closing completely, which interferes with automations even if the browser instance is not visible.

We recommend closing Microsoft Edge by right-clicking the Microsoft Edge icon in the System Tray, and selecting Close Microsoft Edge. This ensures that no other user profiles remain in use in the background.

The Click activity with the Simulate input method no longer works on HTML elements that have a click handler with javascript: URI.

In this case, the simulated click will not take effect and no errors will reported.

This was reported as a Chromium bug here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1299742 This issue is quite rare as very few HTML elements have click handlers in this form.

Workaround

Change the input method for the failing Click activity from Simulate to any other input method:

The DeveloperToolsAvailability has the following possible values:

If the UiPath Extension for Edge is installed using Group Policy, then the DeveloperToolsAvailability must be set to 1 to enable the full functionality of the extension.

This value is automatically set correctly when the extension is installed but it will be overwritten if your system administrator has set another value for this policy.

The other values for DeveloperToolsAvailability cause the problems listed below.

If DeveloperToolsAvailability is set to 0 then:

If DeveloperToolsAvailability is set to 2 then:

The UiPath Web Automation browser window shows the following warning if ChromeNativeMessaging.exe could not be started:

Cannot communicate with UiPath Platform The native part of the extension is not configured correctly.

Re-install the extension from UiPath Studio.

See Check If ChromeNativeMessaging.exe Is Running.

For MV3 extensions, the browser loads the extension later, after the web pages have loaded. This means that on slower machines, the Open Browser activity from UiPath.UiAutomation.Activities version 20.10 or older can reach the internal timeout of 20 seconds before the extension has started.

Starting with v20.10.13, the internal timeout for the Open Browser activity has been increased from 20 seconds to 60 seconds.

Additionally, you can configure the timeout through the UIPATH_OPEN_BROWSER_TIMEOUT_SECONDS environment variable. For example, set UIPATH_OPEN_BROWSER_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=120 to use 120 seconds for the activity's timeout.