Why am I getting an error when loading webviews in VS Code?

Question

I'm using a portable install of VS Code 1.56.1 on Windows 10. Whenever open an extension from the marketplace, I get the following error:

Error loading webview: Error: Could not register service workers: TypeError: Failed to register a ServiceWorker for scope ('vscode-webview://extensioneditor/') with script ('vscode-webview://extensioneditor/service-worker.js?platform=electron&id=extensionEditor&vscode-resource-origin=https%3A%2F%2FextensionEditor.vscode-webview-test.com'): ServiceWorker cannot be started.

Same thing happens for other things using webviews, with a slightly different path (like VS Code release notes). I'm able to install plugins and view the Feature Contributions tab, but I cannot view the Details and Changelog tabs.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this? This is on a managed machine where security settings might be changing. I'm using a portable install because my installed version stopped working out of the blue last week and this was supposed to be the workaround until that was figured out.

Answer 1

I was getting the same error, it looks like an issue introduced on version 1.56.0.

For me the fix was running VS Code without elevated permissions.

I always run as administrator and running without it fixed the issue for me.

Answer 2

I had this problem, in terminal use code . --no-sandbox

Updating python3 to the most recent version may also help.