openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix OpenClaw browser service: intermittent timeouts on click actions (20s cap) – root-cause analysis and fix plan [1 comments, 1 participants]

Summary

OpenClaw’s browser automation occasionally times out during click actions, even though navigation succeeds. The known 20,000 ms (20s) cap appears to constrain click interactions.

Symptoms

• Navigation (page loads) succeeds
• Click actions fail with a timeout after ~20 seconds
• Timeouts are intermittent, not deterministic
• Common workarounds observed: restarting the browser, navigating directly to URLs, inserting delays between actions

Root Cause

• A hard timeout limit of 20 seconds is enforced for click actions in the browser automation flow, causing click operations to time out even when navigation completes successfully.

Evidence

• Documented in internal notes: “OpenClaw browser service experiencing intermittent timeouts” with the 20s click-timeout behavior and observed workarounds.
• Source: memory/archive/substack-account-setup.md, sections covering the browser issue.

Reproduction

• In QA: navigate to a page with interactive elements, then perform a click on a visible element. After about 20 seconds, the click times out.

Proposed Fix

• Increase the click-action timeout or make it configurable per environment.
• Add robust waits for element readiness and retry logic for click actions.
• Ensure the browser automation code uses a configurable timeout for click interactions and does not hard-stop at 20s.

Impact

• Low user-facing impact; primarily improves reliability of automated browser QA flows and byroad-like automation scripts.

References

• Memory: memory/archive/substack-account-setup.md (browser issues section)