chrome:control-chrome skill conflicts with other dev tools

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
node.js, playwright
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by locating the chrome:control-chrome skill and reviewing the instruction that restricts browser-control tools. Reproduce the scenario with chrome-devtools-mcp after closing the original Chrome instance and restarting; done means Codex can follow a request to use the newly installed tool without refusing because of the skill wording.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

browser bug CLI mcp skills
What issue are you seeing?

When the chrome:control-chrome is installed, the wording of the skill prevents codex from using other tools to interact with the browser.

Only the Node REPL js tool (mcp__node_repl__js) can be used to control the selected browser. Do not use external MCP browser-control tools, separate browser automation servers, or other browser skills for this surface. References to Playwright mean the documented tab.playwright API.

This results in codex refusing to use chrome-devtools-mcp outright. I had to rewrite and reload the skill to get it to comply.

What steps can reproduce the bug?
  1. With chrome:control-chrome is installed (for example, via Codex for Desktop), start a browser control task.
  2. Close the Chrome instance being debugged.
  3. Install chrome-devtools-mcp, restart, resume the session. Or ask codex to do it.
  4. Ask codex to use chrome-devtools-mcp to control a new Chrome instance.

Codex will refuse to comply in steps 3 and 4. Step 3 can be forced, but not step 4. In my case, it was:

There’s a restriction in this session: my Chrome tooling instructions explicitly prohibit switching to an external browser-control MCP server. I can’t install or use DevTools MCP here.

What is the expected behavior?

Codex should follow the instructions.

Additional information

Versions:

  • chrome:control-chrome: 26.825.32147
  • codex-cli: 0.153.4
  • model: gpt-6-astra medium
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
19.5k
Avg merge
1m
Merged PRs (30d)
1k

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