Codex Desktop crashes when Excalidraw opens a local image
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Tech stack
- electron
- Domain
- desktop
Research direction
Reproduce the crash in Codex Desktop by opening Excalidraw at excalidraw.com and importing a local image through the macOS picker. Start by inspecting the embedded browser process and the Crashpad sidecars under ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/Crashpad/pending/, then compare the behavior with related issue #20785. Done means the image imports successfully or a recoverable error is shown without exiting the application.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Codex Desktop crashes when Excalidraw opens a local image
Codex version
26.707.91948
Platform
- macOS 26.5.1 (Build 25F80)
- Apple Silicon / arm64 (Apple M1)
- Electron/Chromium 150.0.7871.115
Issue
Codex Desktop exits completely when a local image is selected from Excalidraw in the built-in browser.
This is reproducible and appears to crash the embedded browser process rather than showing a normal page or renderer error.
Steps to reproduce
- Open the Codex built-in browser.
- Navigate to
https://www.excalidraw.com/. - Use Excalidraw's image/open function.
- Select a local image using the macOS file picker.
- Codex Desktop exits immediately.
Expected behavior
The selected image should be imported into Excalidraw. If the image cannot be decoded or local-file access is unsupported, the browser should display a recoverable error without terminating Codex Desktop.
Actual behavior
The entire Codex Desktop application exits.
Crash evidence
Two reproductions on July 16, 2026 generated pending Crashpad sidecars at approximately 15:04 and 15:09 local time:
{"osarch":"arm64","ptype":"browser"}
The files were created under:
~/Library/Application Support/Codex/Crashpad/pending/
No corresponding macOS DiagnosticReports crash file was generated.
Additional information
- The crash occurs through a user-driven local file picker inside the built-in browser.
- This may be related to local-file authorization, image decoding, or the embedded Chromium browser process.
- Related but less severe file-upload limitation: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/20785
- No local image, image contents, account identifiers, or full telemetry logs are included in this report.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 125k
- Forks
- 19.5k
- Avg merge
- 1m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 1k
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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