[Windscribe extension] Engine error for all flavors

[Interiorhood]

Bug Description

An engine error occurs for all flavors regardless of what regex I input or what test string I put.
I have tried hard refreshing the page, clearing the cache, clearing the cookies, updating my browser, restarting my browser, restarting my device, and probably some other basic thing I forgot to mention.
It used to work perfectly fine for me and I use the site frequently, however, yesterday it randomly said "nah" and it's been like this for me ever since.
I have almost no extensions (and it shouldn't matter because it worked fine with them before) and haven't done pretty much anything different that I could possibly imagine broke it.
I have also tried using a VPN to see if it was a network issue but that did not fix it.
Using the "app" version from Microsoft edge also has the same issue.
Using incognito DID solve the issue but this is more of a band-aid fix, and I'd rather not do this every time (mainly because I want to actually be able to use my account).

Reproduction steps

The only thing I need to do to reproduce it is type anything into the regex bar and an error occurs after a while (as it needs to timeout first before giving the error).

Expected Outcome

I get to actually use the website to test regex lol.
I would expect the regex engine not to error out and instead be able to tell me if my regex matches any string.

Browser

Microsoft Edge for Business
Version 123.0.2420.97 (Official build) (64-bit)

OS

Windows 11 Pro

[Interiorhood]

Inspect doesn't show much for network errors or console errors other than ads not loading (not due to extensions).
Third party cookies are blocked but that also applies to my incognito browser and the only third party cookie that was even blocked was "BuySellAds" which is obviously just for ads and isn't needed for the site to function (otherwise I would have had issues for years lol).

[working-name]

Hello @Interiorhood,

I'd look at the network tab and do a force refresh (CTRL + SHIFT + R). Go through the list and see what is blocked or not allowed. Buysellads as you already figured out doesn't affect functionality.

I have Brave with a bunch of extensions including uBlock origin, and it's enabled but still fine.

The difference between regular and incognito is most likely that some of your addons (if not all) are not loaded. You can disable all of them, load regex101, then enable one, force-reload the page until you get to the bottom of which addon is screwing it up.

[Interiorhood]

first blocked one is https://analytics.regex101.com/js/plausible.js which is for ads
and second blocked one is https://srv.buysellads.com/ads/CESIEKJM.json?callback=jsonp_1713285493709_17587 which is also for ads.
no other requests were blocked and i completely just uninstalled all my add-ons other than windscribe vpn, which is disabled.

[Interiorhood]

Here are the results after clearing the cache and doing a hard refresh

Pretty much the same thing

[working-name]

Interesting. Anything in console?

I have never used Edge for business though, so not sure what they took out or started blocking, but it's odd that incognito works.

[Interiorhood]

Yeah I find it odd too.
The business version should be exactly the same or nearly exactly the same though.
Also it used to work fine for me with the business version

[Interiorhood]

This is the error at the bottom but expanded:

[working-name]

There we go, the Unable to load worker, timeout after 10s - that would be an issue. Timeout would make me think it's a networking issue but it could also be that the browser doesn't allow the worker to run. Which again, is odd. I'll try to get a VM up and running and play around a bit.

[Interiorhood]

I found a solution... somehow the disabled VPN was causing the issue.
I should note that I had the VPN disabled within the extension rather than the actual extension itself being disabled via the browser but that's still so weird.
I figured the only possible difference should be my add-ons so I tried uninstalling just for ####s and it worked.
I don't use it much but still that makes so little sense and it used to work fine before with that extension so I have no idea why or even how it was doing that but the issue is found at least.

[Interiorhood]

I didn't have the issue before with that extension, but I think the VPN was on during that. My guess is that for some reason just that single request was attempting to use a resource from the VPN or something similar that caused it to break.

[Interiorhood]

If you have a list of known issues with extensions, you may want to put Windscribe as one of them. I doubt this would just be a me thing.

[working-name]

Ok, that is congruent with the timeout error then. Without having tested the extension, I want to say that it's more about network filtering than it is about the extension itself just being loaded, but good job finding it!

Thanks for the report, I'll look into this extension.

[Interiorhood]

Thank you! I wouldnt have guessed to uninstall my disabled vpn if it wasnt for you.

[MasterInQuestion]

    Summary:
    Fail of browser extensions meddling.