Unclear What decides whether the emulator or local Chrome is used is not known.
What
When Claude previews an artifact, Claude Code now chooses between two ways of doing it:
local_chrome, which renders it in a headless browser (a browser with no window) on your machine and returns screenshots, as before.- An emulator, which opens a private copy of the artifact in an artifact viewer inside the session and returns pictures.
The emulator comes with its own permission prompt, saying Claude wants to look at the artifact in the artifact viewer inside this session. When it fails, Claude is told not to try checking the artifact some other way.
Why
In some setups this removes the need for Chrome on your machine to preview an artifact. If you see the new permission prompt, the preview is being done inside the session instead of in a local browser.
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What decides whether the emulator or local Chrome is used is not known.