Recently, a Windows Defender update rolled out that is inadvertently causing dramatically slower launching of the Ignition Designer, Perspective Workstation, and Vision with the Web Browser module installed.
This is confirmed to be related to the packaged Chromium browser extraction due to some change in Windows Defender.
The remediation options are:
Add the directory with Chromium binaries to the whitelist.
Rollback the Windows Defender update.
Our recommendation is to add the binaries directory to the whitelist:
Go to Start → Settings → Update & Security → Windows Security → Virus & threat protection.
Under Virus & threat protection settings, select Manage settings.
Under Exclusions, select Add or remove exclusions.
Select Add an exclusion, and then select the directory with the Chromium binaries. this is within the .ignition directory: ~/.ignition/cache/resources/jxbrowser
This would have to be done on clients where the designer, workstation, or vision clients which use the Web Browser Component are installed, not the gateway.
Thank you for finding a solution.
At first, the solution didn't work for us. For some reason, our Windows environment variable %USERPROFILE% did not work in the Anti-Virus Exclusions. Our Admins had to use a different wildcard to the same path, and then it worked.
From a cmd prompt, I typed SET to see the environment variables, and it looked correct.
%USERPROFILE%\.ignition\cache\resources\jxbrowser
vs
C:\users\*\.ignition\cache\resources\jxbrowser
We are working on a fix at the moment and are targeting the 8.1.46 release. The fix itself is a bit of a moving target at the moment due to some other considerations that have to be made, but its the highest priority ticket currently.
I've just added the exclusion to my VM that is running designer - I can now launch a designer session where before i couldn't. However, now the perspective module has disappeared...
The Perspective module not showing up in the Designer indicates a failure on startup. Check the 'Output Console' in the designer after startup and you should see logging indicating that something failed when launching JxBrowser.
08:11:42.065 [Designer-Startup] INFO Perspective.Designer -- Starting up Perspective module. Mode: Activated
8:11:42.203 ERROR Starting chromium process... [FAILED]
java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "XXX\.ignition\cache\resources\jxbrowser\7.38.2\chromium.exe" (in directory "XXX\.ignition\cache\resources\jxbrowser\7.38.2"): CreateProcess error=1392, The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable
Note: This update did have some changes related to support on Apple Devices, specifically that Rosetta is not supported anymore in the x86_64 (intel) JXBrowser, meaning that we had to bundle both the x86 and Apple Silicon JXBrowser libraries in the platform for continued support on both architectures for the Designer and Vision Web Browser Component. This is included in the platform and no action is needed.
This change however also affects Perspective Workstation. The bundled version of Perspective Workstation is now Apple Silicon ONLY
We do offer an Intel compatible version on our website for older Mac devices, but due to size it was not included in the default Ignition footprint.
In the event that it is required at scale (doubtful) you can drop this file into lib/core/launch prior to startup and it can be retrieved from the gateway using the URL /system/nativelaunch?type=workstation&os=osx_intel
