Browser Extension: Faster CaseChat, Steady Badges, Tougher Recovery

The browser extension was running a chat sync pattern and a session-handling pattern that the portal and mobile app had already moved on from. This release brings it up to parity. The headline: opening a CaseChat room feels instant on busy cases, the unread count on your toolbar icon stays accurate even after a long idle, and a class of cold-start errors that had been silently breaking authenticated reads is fixed.

CaseChat Opens Instantly, Even on Busy Rooms browser extension

Opening a chat room used to fetch the entire message history. On a high-volume case the extension would stall for seconds before painting anything. Now the extension requests just the most recent 50 messages on first paint and loads older messages incrementally as you scroll up. Same pattern the portal and mobile app already use, applied to the extension. Empty rooms also stop sitting on a loading spinner forever and render the empty state immediately.

The Unread Badge Stays Accurate browser extension

Two long-running issues with the toolbar badge are resolved. First, the badge could freeze at a stale count when your sign-in session expired in the background. The extension now refreshes the session automatically and resumes the live unread count instead of going dark. Second, the badge could briefly drop to zero every time your browser woke the extension up from idle. The extension now waits until it has the real numbers before touching the count, so the badge never flashes wrong. The periodic background check that keeps the badge in sync runs every minute now instead of every five.

Recovers Cleanly From Network Drops and Sleep browser extension

If your network blipped, your laptop slept, or you switched tabs for a while, the extension's Realtime connection could come back without realizing it had missed messages while it was away. Now, every time the connection recovers, the extension refetches the chat list and the active conversation from the server, so anything that arrived during the gap shows up immediately. The same refresh runs when you bring the popup back to the foreground from a hidden tab. And browser launch now reopens the chat channels right away, so you do not have to wait for the next periodic check after you boot Chrome.

Cold-Start "Permission Denied" Errors, Fixed browser extension

A class of authenticated reads in the extension could fail with a confusing "permission denied" error at the very start of a session, when the auth token was technically valid but the SDK had not finished setting it up. The fix routes every authenticated read through a single shared session gate that proactively refreshes the token if it is about to expire and retries the read once if a refresh was needed. We also added a build-time check so any future code that bypasses the gate fails CI before it can ship.

Installation

The Chrome and Firefox stores update automatically. The Safari extension update will follow once the Mac App Store rebuild is approved.