With version 142, Google Chrome just rolled out a new permission prompt for Local Network Access.

While technically a good feature, this caused me the better half of the day hunting a production bug in our SaaS product, which after all did not exist.

Turns out that Chrome will display the permission dialog also for requests which your company’s IT-mandated Endpoint Protection solution is grabbing for inspection. In our case, it was Zscaler causing issues.

If you deny the request (which from an end user perspective is the only reasonable choice), your web application will act weird.

Lucky me, our devices had just upgraded to Chrome 142 at the very same day we rolled out a production release. That’s how all hell broke loose.