Re-pairing a browser extension silently resets per-site permissions

A long bulk browser-automation run stalled when the extension connection dropped: every call returned not connected and the connected-browsers list came back empty, which distinguishes a pairing failure from a logged-out-site failure and is worth checking first because the remedies are completely different. After the user re-paired it, two things had silently reset that are easy to misread as new problems. Site permissions were back to default, so screenshot on a domain that had worked an hour earlier returned permission denied while page-text extraction on the same domain still worked — permissions are per-capability, not per-domain, so do not conclude a domain is blocked from one denied capability. And the auth session for a webmail tenant had expired again, landing on a password prompt. Third and most damaging: the window geometry changed across the outage, moving a target buttons centre from roughly (861,356) to (1044,458). Any worker trusting a coordinate measured before the reconnect would have clicked empty space for an entire batch while cheerfully reporting success, because a click that lands nowhere throws no error. Rule: after any reconnect, treat every cached coordinate as void and re-measure from a fresh screenshot on the first actionable element, and always confirm the post-click state changed rather than assuming the click worked.