Testing with watir chromedriver failed with Sec-Fetch-User in Request Headers - selenium-chromedriver

Question

I am using watir for testing an internal application. The testing recently stops working.
These are the simplified steps of the test:
require 'watir'
Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome.path = 'PATH_TO_CHROME_EXE'
browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome, :options => {:options => {'useAutomationExtension' => false}}
URL = "TEST_URL"
browser.goto URL
After the goto line executed, the browser failed to navigate to the page. When inspecting the network activity, The request status showing as canceled. I also noticed the "Sec-Fetch-User" field populate in the header:
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
**Sec-Fetch-User: ?1**
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3865.90 Safari/537.36
If I directly enter the test URL into the browser, the field is not populated and the login pop-up.
This is my setting:
jruby 9.2.5.0 (2.5.0) 2018-12-06 6d5a228 Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 25.102-b14 on 1.8.0_102-b14 +jit [mswin32-x86_64]
Version 77.0.3865.90 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Watir 6.16.5
ChromeDriver 77.0.3865.40 (f484704e052e0b556f8030b65b953dce96503217-refs/branch-heads/3865#{#442})
Did anyone run into similar issue? Would it be possible to suppress the header?
Steve

Answer 1

I run into exactly the same problem of Sec-Fetch-User: ?1.
The only way I could get to load the webpage I wanted was to ditch the chromedriver and use the firefox driver instead. Firefox did not send those headers.
I think that, if you really need to use chromedriver, and if you need to change the headers is to use a proxy like https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy