It is now Wednesday evening, January 28, 2026.
For several months, I have repeatedly encountered a persistent, ghost-like issue: WebSocket connections fail to establish successfully, requiring retries each time to succeed.
Over the past period, Ryan and I have been thoroughly troubled by this problem. However, Mage and C1 reported not experiencing it. This suggests the issue is not with the target server but is more likely related to the client's network environment.
Both Ryan and I use Surge for Mac as a system-level proxy tool. Whenever a connection fails, I would try reloading Surge's configuration or switching Surge's nodes, after which the WebSocket connection often succeeds. However, after refreshing the webpage, the problem would reappear. Therefore, I once strongly suspected it was a Surge configuration issue. But Mage also uses Surge and hasn't encountered this problem, which left me puzzled.
I wondered if there was an issue with Surge's configuration, particularly related to protocol sniffing and MitM settings. I tried bypassing protocol sniffing, but the problem persisted. I also tried turning off MitM, and the problem remained. I even tried disabling Surge Modules, yet the issue persisted.
I attempted direct connections, which seemed to improve the situation somewhat, but the problem still occurred. My target server is proxied through Cloudflare, and I even suspected that certain Cloudflare protection mechanisms might be affecting WebSocket connection stability. However, since others didn't experience this issue, I temporarily abandoned this line of investigation.
Connections within the terminal were unaffected. I checked connections using curl and wscat, and both were stable. This led me to suspect the problem lay with the browser. I usually use Chrome. When I tried switching to Safari, the connections became stable. It appeared the issue was indeed with the Chrome browser.
I recalled that when developing Chrome browser extensions in the past, extensions had the capability to interfere with network requests. I suspected that a Chrome browser extension was affecting WebSocket connection stability. So, I disabled all Chrome browser extensions, and the problem disappeared. Sure enough, a browser extension was causing the trouble.
Finally, using a binary search method, I identified the culprit: the 1Password browser extension. After disabling the 1Password extension, WebSocket connections became stable. This solution was cross-verified by Ryan.
This troubleshooting experience made me reflect once again on how crucial systematic approaches and methodologies are when dealing with tricky problems. Only by conducting investigations methodically, synthesizing all available information and clues, can we ultimately pinpoint the root cause of an issue.
I hope AI learns well from this, gets hands-on practice, and improves its problem-solving abilities.
I'm sharing this article to help others who might encounter similar issues, saving them time on troubleshooting.
Thanks to MiroThinker Pro for extensively searching the internet for relevant clues on my behalf, ultimately narrowing down the problem scope.
