claude-in-chrome: account switch (personal Max → Teams) breaks connection; reinstall fixes

Summary

The Claude in Chrome extension worked consistently while I was signed in with a personal Max 5x account. After I switched to a Teams account — logging out on both sides (Claude Code in the terminal and claude.ai in Chrome) and logging back in with the new account — Claude Code could no longer reach Chrome at all. The extension was still installed and enabled, and Chrome was open and logged into the same account as the CLI.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the extension fixed it immediately, with no other change: same Chrome, same profile, same account, no Chrome restart needed beyond what the reinstall did.

This suggests the extension caches some account-scoped state at install time that is not invalidated when the signed-in account changes, leaving the pairing permanently stale.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install the Claude in Chrome extension and use it successfully with a personal Max 5x account (worked fine).
2. Switch to a Teams account: log out of Claude Code in the terminal, log out of claude.ai in Chrome, then log back in on both with the Teams account.
3. Start a Claude Code session and ask it to use the browser.

Expected

Claude Code connects to Chrome, as it did before the account switch.

Actual

Every browser tool call fails to find any browser:

mcp__claude-in-chrome__tabs_context_mcp {createIfEmpty: true}
→ Browser extension is not connected. Please ensure the Claude browser extension
  is installed and running (https://claude.ai/chrome), and that you are logged
  into claude.ai with the same account as Claude Code. ...

mcp__claude-in-chrome__list_connected_browsers
→ []

list_connected_browsers returning an empty array is the useful detail: the extension does not merely fail to respond, it is not registered against the account at all — even though it is installed, enabled, and Chrome is signed in with that same account.

Workaround (confirmed)

Uninstall the extension, install it again. Immediately after:

mcp__claude-in-chrome__list_connected_browsers
→ [{ "name": "Browser 1", "osPlatform": "macOS", "isLocal": true, ... }]   # 1 device

mcp__claude-in-chrome__select_browser   → Selected browser "Browser 1".
mcp__claude-in-chrome__tabs_context_mcp → tab group created
mcp__claude-in-chrome__navigate + computer(screenshot) → page rendered correctly

Nothing else was changed between the failing and working state.

Environment

• Claude Code: 2.1.273
• Google Chrome: 153.0.8010.47
• macOS: 26.5.2 (build 25F84)
• Extension: installed from https://claude.ai/chrome
• Account: personal Max 5x → Teams (both logged into claude.ai and Claude Code with the same account at the time of failure)

Why this may not be a duplicate

There is a large cluster of open reports with the same symptom — #93991, #91145, #92668, #89913, #89482, #93473, #91959, #88232, #88558, #79985 — but I could not find one that names an account/plan switch as the trigger, and #79985 reports the opposite outcome (reinstall did not help there). If the account-switch path is the same root cause as that cluster, this issue is hopefully still useful as the reproducible trigger and a confirmed workaround.

Suggested fix

Invalidate or re-establish the extension's device pairing when the signed-in claude.ai account changes, instead of requiring a full uninstall/reinstall. Failing that, surfacing "registered to a different account" in the error text (instead of the generic "not connected") would make this self-diagnosable — the current message sends people down the install/enable/restart path, which does not fix it.