As the title says, Kasperky pushed a new update yesterday, completely breaking the Surf Shark browser extension. When I connect I get an error message saying" Proxy connection error. Error code: initial_request_failed". Killing the Kaspersky app fixes the issue. I have already made all the network and app exclusions on Kaspersky. Could you let me know if anybody knows of a possible solution?
Hi there. It sounds like Kaspersky might be interfering with the Surfshark extension. Usually setting an exception in Kaspersky’s settings would resolve the issue however since you are using the extension instead of the app, you would need to add the whole browser as an exception for Kaspersky. In this case, the one thing that could help is fully reinstalling the Surfshark extension on your browser, so it would be great if you could try that out.
In case that does not help, I would highly recommend installing the Surfshark application on your computer and adding it into the Kaspersky antivirus’s exception list. Using the app instead of the extension should help you avoid the issue.
Update: It’s the safe browsing setting that’s causing all the problems. I don’t want to disable that though.
This happened with both my SurfShark and NordVPN Chrome Extensions, but I found it wasn’t with the Safe Browsing extension but the Security Settings > Advanced Settings > Network Settings. There is an area to Turn on/off Encrypted Connection scan. You can try “Do Not Scan Encrypted Connections” as a test, but I was able to just add *.surfshark and *.nordvpn.com to the Trusted Addresses list in that same area and both extensions started working again.
I have already tried to reinstall it, but it didn’t work. Now for your other point, I do have both, the app and the extension, but the extension is helpful when gaming because I turn off my VPN for better ping but I also use the browser, so the browser extension is very important for me. Is there any way to add the extension as an exclusion?
Unfortunately there is no way to add the extension as an exception without excluding the entire browser. As for the issue of the VPN slowing down your games, if you are using a Windows computer, you can add the game you are playing to be bypassed by the VPN by using our Bypasser feature. This way, the game should not be slowed down, but you would still have an active VPN connection on your browser. I highly recommend checking out this guide on how to do this:
https://support.surfshark.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017349293-How-to-use-Surfshark-Bypasser-on-Windows
Bypassed does nothing for me, I’ve tried it multiple times.