diff --git a/browser-service/src/core/browser.py b/browser-service/src/core/browser.py
index 8a5eccf..59e978d 100644
--- a/browser-service/src/core/browser.py
+++ b/browser-service/src/core/browser.py
@@ -202,11 +202,17 @@
 
                 # Fall back to Playwright rendering
                 # Separate context for each fetch for isolation
-                context = await self._browser.new_context(
-                    viewport={'width': 1280, 'height': 800},
-                    user_agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'
-                )
-                page = await context.new_page()
+                try:
+                    context = await asyncio.wait_for(
+                        self._browser.new_context(
+                            viewport={'width': 1280, 'height': 800},
+                            user_agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'
+                        ), timeout=20.0
+                    )
+                    page = await asyncio.wait_for(context.new_page(), timeout=20.0)
+                except Exception as ce:
+                    logger.warning(f"Browser stall during parallel fetch context: {ce}. Falling back to error state.")
+                    return {"url": url, "success": False, "error": f"Failed to initialize Chromium context locally: {ce}", "fetch_mode": "js"}
                 try:
                     await page.goto(url, wait_until="domcontentloaded", timeout=20000)
                     await asyncio.sleep(1)  # Wait for JS dynamic content
@@ -236,7 +242,8 @@
                         "fetch_mode": "js"
                     }
                 finally:
-                    await context.close()
+                    if 'context' in locals():
+                        await context.close()
 
         tasks = [fetch_one(url) for url in urls]
         return await asyncio.gather(*tasks)