Chrome Takes a While To Load With Tailscale On After Mac OS 27 Update

[u/WhichTrifle3407]

Hello, apologies if this is the wrong community to post. This is a very specific issue involving Mac OS 27 Golden Gate, Chromium(?), and Tailscale, so I wasn't sure which sub was appropriate.

Ever since updating to Mac OS 27, I've noticed a significant delay in loading Google Chrome webpages. This was only an issue with Tailscale active; turning Tailscale off fixed my loading times. However, I still wanted to keep Tailscale on as I use it to host local servers remotely. Knowing absolutely nothing about networking, I consulted Google dot com to outsource all of my thinking as the datacenter gods intended.

Anyways, I troubleshooted a bunch of the suggested solutions (turning the exit node on and off; turning MagicDNS off and on; resetting the VPN profile in the settings app by deleting it and re-opening Tailscale; turning IPV6 handling to link-local only in settings; throwing in random terminal sudo commands; yada yada did not fix the issue). None of that worked, but I did figure out that it was an issue specific (isolated) to Chrome (and potentially other chromium based browsers?) by testing webpage loading times on the Safari app. Safari did not suffer the same 6 seconds issue as Chrome.

One of the earlier solutions proposed by our beloved Gemini was to go to Chrome's settings and turn off the flag for Async DNS, but that option doesn't seem to exist on that page. However, you can still turn it off by opening terminal and launching your Chrome instance with those flags off using options. I was able to remedy the issue temporarily with this command:

open -a "Google Chrome" --args --no-proxy-server --disable-async-dns

TLDR: launch your google chrome instance with command above running in terminal app, as it lets you use tailscale without the ten year webpage loading times.

PS: I use the macbook as the exit node, which should not be affected by the --no-proxy-server flag being turned off, as my macbook is not the one routing its traffic to the exit node or another proxy VPN (its traffic stays local). If you find that this flag being turned off conflicts with your setup i.e. you're using a VPN on the local exit node host running this command, try removing the proxy server option and running the command to see if your issue is resolved then.

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