Lens opens a browser in a separate window as an isolated clear instance

Lens Support & Troubleshooting
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#1

Hello,
with Lens: 2025.2.141554-latest, Electron: 33.4.0, Chrome: 130.0.6723.191, Node: 20.18.1 while port forwarding or login with teleport Lens creates a new window with clear Chrome browser. In earlier versions Lens used browser that installed in system so I can use active Chrome instance. How can I configure Lens?

#2

Hello @plight , Thank you for reaching out ! I have a reach out to our development regarding your issue .

#3

Hello @plight,

What do you have in output, if you write this command in the terminal?
xdg-settings set default-web-browser

Also, we have released a new version, could you update Lens and try again, please?

Best Regards,
Tikhon Kudinov
Lens Support Engineer
Mirantis, Inc

#4

Maybe you mean xdg-settings get default-web-browser:

~$ xdg-settings get default-web-browser 
google-chrome.desktop

My current lens version is:
Lens: 2025.5.81206-latest
Electron: 35.2.1
Chrome: 134.0.6998.205
Node: 22.14.0

No changes(

#5

Any updates on this issue? Lens is opening new Google Chrome windows for me too, and it is not considering xdg-settings at all. Even if I set it to Firefox, it still opens links in Google. Moreover, this google chrome window shows me that it is not default browser (but it is). It is weird, it is like this version of Google is isolated and different from my default Google Chrome.

#6

Hello @talgatbek1 @plight , thanks a lot for reporting this and for sharing the details of your setups.

We’ve investigated the issue across macOS, Windows 11, and Ubuntu. On macOS and Windows, Lens correctly respects the system default browser. However, on Linux we were able to reproduce the problem you described: Lens does not reliably use the configured default browser (xdg-settings). Depending on the environment, this can result in Lens either opening Firefox when Chrome is set as default, or launching an isolated Chrome instance instead of the user’s active browser session.

We’ve filed this as a regression in Lens so our team can work on a fix.

Thanks again for helping us track this down — we’ll update the thread once we have progress on the fix.