What Happened to SquareX? The Timeline of the Delisting and Zscaler Acquisition

In early 2026, former SquareX users ran into a practical problem before they got an explanation. The Chrome Web Store listing stopped resolving like a normal product page, which meant the self-serve install path was effectively gone. On February 5, 2026, Zscaler announced that it had acquired the company.

If you are reading this because the listing disappeared or because you want to understand what the Zscaler deal changed, this is the short, factual version. No gloating, no gotchas, no hot takes about the acquisition economy. Just the timeline, what is publicly confirmed, and what former users should do next.

We built a competing product, so take the framing with a grain of salt. What you will not find below is any claim we cannot back up. If a statement is inference rather than public confirmation, we say so.

The Timeline

How SquareX Started: A Throwaway Tab With Serious Backing

The early SquareX pitch was elegant. Regular browsers are infected machines in waiting. Every tab runs JavaScript from strangers, stores cookies that persist for years, and leaves behind a trail that advertisers, data brokers, and the occasional attacker all feed on. If you could draw a line between a disposable session and your real computer, you could neutralize most of the everyday internet threats at the source.

The architectural answer was a cloud-rendered browser. A user would click the SquareX extension, a fresh Chromium instance would spin up in the SquareX cloud, and the browsing experience would be streamed back to the local tab. When the tab closed, the VM was destroyed. Nothing persisted, nothing touched the user's machine.

Sequoia put institutional credibility behind the company in February 2023. The extension shipped on the Chrome Web Store and accumulated a substantial public user base and review count. For a while, it was one of the clearest consumer-facing pitches in an otherwise enterprise-heavy category.

The Series A and the Slow Pivot

Two years later, in April 2025, SquareX announced a Series A. That does not, by itself, prove a pivot. It does tell you the company had moved beyond the earliest startup stage and was now valuable enough to matter to larger platform buyers.

Publicly, SquareX was also becoming easier to describe as a browser-security company rather than only a disposable-browser extension. That broader framing matters because it lines up with the kind of capability Zscaler said it wanted to add to its Zero Trust platform.

We are not claiming more than the public record supports. The safe conclusion is narrower: by the time Zscaler acquired SquareX, the company's technology was strategically relevant to enterprise browser security, not just to a consumer Chrome extension.

Early 2026: The Chrome Web Store Listing Changed

The strongest thing we can say publicly today is that the SquareX Chrome Web Store listing no longer resolves like a normal product page. It redirects to an empty listing state, which means the ordinary install path no longer works for new users.

That is enough to explain the user impact without pretending we have a perfect internal timeline. If you were trying to install SquareX through the public Web Store path, you no longer could. If you were an existing user, the public signals around the extension became materially different from the normal live-listing state.

We are deliberately not using the current listing state as proof of the exact day the change happened. The live page is enough to support one precise claim: the public SquareX listing is not currently a working self-serve install surface.

February 5, 2026: Zscaler Announces the Acquisition

On February 5, 2026, Zscaler announced the acquisition. The press release leaned into a browser-security narrative: SquareX would help Zscaler secure standard browsers with lightweight extensions and avoid the need for separate third-party browsers.

What the announcement did not do was promise a revival of the old Chrome Web Store path for the consumer extension. The public messaging is about Zscaler's platform and browser-security controls, not about a standalone self-serve listing.

The safest inference from the public material is that SquareX's technology is being carried forward inside Zscaler's browser-security product direction. The unsafe inference would be to state a packaging detail or standalone roadmap that Zscaler has not publicly committed to.

What This Means for the Thousands of Users

If you used SquareX for disposable sessions, a few things are probably true for you.

• Your reason for using SquareX has not gone away. You had browsing sessions you did not want persisting on your machine. That problem still exists. The tool you used for it is what changed.
• Your billing relationship is with the acquired entity. If you had a paid plan, contact SquareX or Zscaler directly for refund or transition details. They are the only parties who can speak to your account specifically.
• Your workflow is still a Chrome workflow. You installed an extension because you wanted isolation inside Chrome, not because you wanted to migrate to a full enterprise stack. If anything, the acquisition is evidence that the workflow you chose was valuable enough to buy.
• Chrome-native browser security did not disappear with SquareX. Legba is still a Chrome extension, and enterprise browser-security products from vendors like Zscaler and LayerX still exist. The market changed shape, but the problem category did not vanish.

Where Legba Fits (and Where It Does Not)

Legba is a Chrome extension that handles browser isolation with an edge-based architecture rather than a cloud VM. The isolation model is different, the latency profile is different, and the company is still independent. If you want the direct product comparison, the Legba vs SquareX write-up is the place to start. If you already know you want to migrate, the alternatives page has the migration offer and the side-by-side feature map.

Where Legba does not fit is the enterprise workload the Zscaler acquisition now points toward. If you are building a security program that needs Secure Web Gateway, Zero Trust Network Access, and a full identity-aware cloud edge, Zscaler is going to be a better home for you than Legba. We ship a Chrome extension. We are happy for people to pick the enterprise stack when that is genuinely what their threat model requires.

The Honest Closing Note

Acquisitions are not failure. SquareX built a product, raised institutional capital, shipped a real browser isolation architecture, and exited to a major security vendor inside three years. That is, on almost any measure, a good outcome for the team and their investors.

What acquisitions often are is an ending for the users who bought into the original promise. There is no public sign today that the old self-serve SquareX Chrome Web Store listing is coming back. If that matters to you, the practical response is to pick a different extension and move on. If you pick Legba, install from the Chrome Web Store and we will help you map your old setup to our controls. If you pick something else, we wish you a quiet inbox and a clean browser.

For the step-by-step migration path, read SquareX to Legba: A Step by Step Migration Guide. For the three-way post-acquisition comparison against enterprise Zscaler, read SquareX vs Zscaler vs Legba.