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detailed_speaker3e0c
Participant
August 26, 2026
Question

Plugins in Illustrator are showing up as blank gray panels, rendering them useless

  • August 26, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 28 views

I’ve been creating my own plugins using Extendscript for quite a while now, and all of a sudden I cannot get any of my plugins to work. When I launch Illustrator, they show up as blank panels instead of showing what they are supposed to show. Example below:

 

There’s about a 50/50 chance when I start Illustrator that ONE of the three plugins that I have will run, but almost never do they always work. This only started happening when I migrated to a new machine, but running a code check says that there is no problem in my code and this is backed up by several of my teammates being able to use the plugins without issue on other operating systems.

My specs are as follows:

  • Adobe Illustrator 2026, version 30.8.0
  • CEP 12.1 (PlugPlug 12.1.1.3), Chromium 99.0.4844.84
  • macOS 26.6.2 (build 25G83)
  • Apple M5, Apple Silicon

    3 replies

    creative explorer
    Community Expert
    creative explorerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 28, 2026

    ​@detailed_speaker3e0c Just taking a stab here, I wonder if CEP 12.1 (PlugPlug 12.1.1.3), Chromium 99.0.4844.84 is not as viable on Apple M5 series. It may have worked like a charm on Intel Macs and earlier versions of the M series with Rosetta. As you know, Adobe is always looking ahead towards technology and getting better; they now use UXP, and sometimes certain plugin formats such CEP no longer work as successfully as before

    m
    detailed_speaker3e0cAuthor
    Participant
    August 28, 2026

    While I agree that CEP12 is aging, and is definitely being phased out, I don’t think that it’s the problem here as several Illustrator functions (home screen, CC libraries) still use CEP. Those are launching just fine, it’s only added extensions that are failing to load. On top of that, to my knowledge, there’s no public documentation or implementation of UXP as of right now, correct? 

    To bring back something I mentioned in my post, it’s a coin flip as to whether or not the panel loads. I have 3 extensions that I use regularly, and each of them has roughly a 47% chance (taken from 60+ quit/load trials) to load correctly which means roughly 10% of the time all 3 panels load and are usable until I quit Illustrator. If it was a CEP compatibility issue, that would mean that it wouldn’t load at all, right?

    detailed_speaker3e0cAuthor
    Participant
    August 28, 2026

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