All browsers take 5 min to load

Posted by Shrini_Roach@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 56 comments

All browsers take 5 min to load 1st website

Suddenly, almost everyone in my company is facing a browser delay issue. After turning on the laptop, opening any link in any browser takes around 5 minutes to load. Once one browser finally loads a page, all the other browsers also start working normally.

As a temporary fix, deleting the browser’s User Data folder from Local AppData resolves the issue. Interestingly, deleting User Data folder of any one browser also fixes the problem for other browsers.

Has anyone seen this before or knows what could be causing it?

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wicomputerguy@reddit

Do you have the Bitwarden extension installed? We recently started experiencing a similar issue and were able to isolate it back to the Bitwarden extension. Deleting just the extension folder for Bitwarden would temporarily resolve it for us. They have an open bug in GitHub for it.

https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/20172

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applevinegar@reddit

Bitwarden is such absolute trash I really wish I didn't argue for the savings against 1password. It has made everyone's life miserable. Every single client app is terrible, from browser extensions to iPhone to windows clients to android. Absolutely awful and barely functional all around.

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Idontremember99@reddit

You are the first person I've heard having major problems with BW. What are your issues with it? It works perfectly fine for me.

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marklein@reddit

Works fine here, I wonder if you have a tool/environment conflict.

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pixeladdie@reddit

I’ve never had any issues in browser or iOS. I don’t use it in an enterprise setting though.

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smarthomepursuits@reddit

That only affected Chrome users from what we experienced.

But going to chrome:\extensions and clicking Update fixed it as well. No deleting needed

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TheOnlyKirb@reddit

I've been working with them on testing the beta build (AlienKnight) and have had great success with it. What was described by OP is similar to what we were experiencing.

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disclosure5@reddit

I would be looking for a "wpad" DNS entry, or a GPO setting proxies.

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notarealaccount223@reddit

Proxy was my first thought security tool my second.

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wrt-wtf-@reddit

It’s always dns

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Defconx19@reddit

I had OP's issue before and it was something in the old internet options menu was a setting like "automatically detect connection." Ones this was unchecked it worked fine.

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StrikerXTZ@reddit

Exactly what I was thinking. Also, We had a similar issue once with a certificate check being blocked by our FW. The FW team sucked so I took the address it was trying to contact and slapped it in everyone's hosts file with 127.0.0.1, that solved it till they moved their asses and fixed the FW rule.

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CatProgrammer@reddit

Firmware?

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StrikerXTZ@reddit

Firewall lol

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CatProgrammer@reddit

That makes more sense.

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readyflix@reddit

Some browser data stored on OneDrive or something ???

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Test-NetConnection@reddit

Check for a timeout to a crl.

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-Steets-@reddit

I have also been experiencing this behavior with Chrome and Chromium-descendant browsers. Tons of users, tons of systems, hell, even my own personal devices. My fix has been wiping the "User Data/Default" folder and that fixes it for a while. No clue what the root cause is, though. I'm guessing some bad cache?

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tardiusmaximus@reddit

Had similar with Google taking 5/10 mins to launch....turned out to be our security software not configured correctly, it was scanning ALL of local Google cache at launch and then only presenting chrome when scan had finished. We whitelisted the cache in the security settings of the security program and it was fine after that.

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Lubeislove@reddit

Had the same issue with all remote workers. Scanning cache folder made it take forever. Added a command to Intune and it fixed it.

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fester250@reddit

Pro tip: it’s always DNS.

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1960fl@reddit

Did someone change the default gateway? In the dhcp settings

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thatguybythere@reddit

I actually said "DNS" out loud automatically and involuntarily when I read this. I got funny looks by the pool

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Extrude380@reddit

I'm troubleshooting a similar thing in work.

My theory just now is, this client has a public DNS record that is a wildcard of their domain, and points to their old website.

This seems to make wpad.ad. resolve to this IP - since they have it as dns search suffix, it goes recursive to their public records - and I'm thinking might explain some browser delays, even if they get 1000mb on speed tests.

Change is scheduled Monday to remove the wildcard, so will see if it helps.

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pixeladdie@reddit

If this came to be as a ticket I’d ask for a HAR to review.

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Critical_Physics_770@reddit

the timing is the clue here. ~5 min is a classic TCP timeout. Something network-level is failing and then falling back. Is this happening on VPN, on-prem, or both? That would narrow it down fast.

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SenTedStevens@reddit

By chance, does the browser have some sort of proxy set up in the config? At a job from long ago, we had that same issue. In the morning, when people first logged into their computers, opening a browser and going to a webpage took a LONG time. But subsequent browser activity was quick. After a lot of digging around for network issues, firewall, etc. I found that there was a proxy server setting set up in the browsers that pointed to nowhere. The machine would sit for a long time, eventually time out trying to access whatever IP that was, then worked normally.

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Awkward-Candle-4977@reddit

you can set gpo to clear history and cache on exit.

additionally, only use real stable versions of browser
https://ma-zamroni.blogspot.com/2025/10/set-windows-office-onedrive-to-real.html#zzzbrowser

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zed0K@reddit

Bandaid solution. It'll slow down every other function that an end user may need to perform.

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Adam_Kearn@reddit

Could be a DNS issue with the start up URL.

I would also check to see if you have redirected profiles with the appdata coming from a file server instead of the local device.

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wintermute023@reddit

It’s DNS. It always DNS.

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_l33ter_@reddit

All browsers take 5 min --> What do you mean by ‘all browsers’? What did you test?

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zedarzy@reddit

Google Chrome and other "browser" was incognito mode

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Snot-p@reddit

Not to be a dick but I had to decipher this as if the girl in accounting reported this via ticket.

"Any website I load takes 5 minutes! I tried the green red yellow circle and the blue green circle!"

Immediately: DNS.

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AcidBuuurn@reddit

You haven’t tried all browsers until you’ve tried the orange and blue circle.

Hilariously when I typed in orange a warning not to talk about politics popped up. I wasn’t going to, but I still won’t.

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_l33ter_@reddit

Nono don't get me wrong :) --> I know, what I would test first. I'm wondering how many | which one thoes OP test.

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milkthegoose@reddit

All browsers man, All browsers

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_l33ter_@reddit

"Of course I believe you straight away"

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Muted_Image_9900@reddit

When you say 'links', are you using a URL rewriter for links in Teams or Outlook? That could be the service that is slowing this down.

Otherwise, sounds like a DNS issue.

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mtetrode@reddit

https://isitdns.com/

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Muted_Image_9900@reddit

Brilliant 👌

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Professional-Heat690@reddit

it's always dns.

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Muted_Image_9900@reddit

It’s not DNS There’s no way it’s DNS It was DNS.

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lpbale0@reddit

Have you recently deployed any new systems like a proxy server, web filter, or DNS filter?

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RiiSei@reddit

Could it be a CRL issue?

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NUTTA_BUSTAH@reddit

Your DNS is fucked. Your server/cache resolves after a long delay, likely fallbck from a timeout with the 5 minute mention. Make sure you don't e.g. have infinite loops in your routes or conditional forwarders.

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Cry-Havok@reddit

Haha reminds me of a project with a Public client that had a requirement for us to stand up an environment where all the admins and devs worked on different TightVNC ports inside Windows RDP.

Simply leaving their tabs open in Firefox during their sessions was enough to hog the compute.

I left expeditiously haha ‘cause wtf are those constraints.

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thomasmitschke@reddit

Did you talked to anyone in your company, that my be responsible for this (e.g server guys, network team, firewall ) - somebody changed something and didn’t tell you!

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MagicBoyUK@reddit

Check your DNS and/or proxy servers.

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AntutuBenchmark@reddit

I've had the same experience on my device with Chrome.

I ultimately decided to switch to Opera, Edge was working fine too.

Like i could wait for a site to load and finish an hour of work on any other browser, what the fuck.

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whetu@reddit

Google have apparently been meddling with subsystems that extensions rely on, very likely to make it harder for adblocking extensions to work.

The bitwarden extension has been widely reported as collateral damage, and it certainly got me. Only thing to do really is kill all chrome processes, then run this to nuke the bitwarden extension:

Remove-Item "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions\nngceckbapebfimnlniiiahkandclblb" -Recurse -Force

Then reinstall the extension.

You may find this is the case with other extensions too.

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