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Mobile·1 min read

Google Lens bug in Chrome hides the close button, trapping users

The X to close Google Lens in Chrome has vanished for many users. Google says it's fixed, but some people are still stuck with the side panel open.

A Chrome browser window with the Google Lens side panel open and no close button visible in its corner.
Image: Android Authority
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If you opened Google Lens in Chrome lately and couldn't find a way to close it, you're not imagining things. The "x" button on the Google Lens side panel has gone missing for a lot of people.

Reports started showing up on Reddit and in Google's Chrome Help forums about a week ago. Lens is Google's AI-powered search tool, the one that lets you search with an image instead of typing words. In Chrome it opens in a side panel, and that panel suddenly had no way out.

The usual fixes didn't help. Closing the tab, quitting Chrome, clearing cache and cookies, even restarting the computer all left the panel stuck. One user in a Chrome subreddit shared a workaround: drag the tab with Lens open into a new window, then drag it back into the old one.

What caused the Google Lens bug in Chrome?

One poster on the Chrome Help forum laid out a detailed analysis. Their conclusion: broken CSS padding and margin calculations in an update to the Lens overlay side panel. CSS is the code that controls how things are laid out on a web page, so a bad calculation can push a button out of view or out of reach. That is a user's diagnosis, not an official one from Google.

Is the Chrome Lens bug fixed?

Google says yes. An employee from Reddit's Google Help Community stepped into the thread to say the issue has been fixed.

Not everyone agrees. Some users replied that they updated Chrome and still see the same missing close button. So for now, the fix seems to have reached some people and not others. If you're one of the unlucky ones, the drag-the-tab trick is the only workaround reported so far.

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Tags:google lenschromebugcssside panel

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