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Cypress Failed to Connect to Chrome: 5 Ways to Easily Fix it

JavaScript doesn’t always work well with Chrome

3 min. read

Updated onOctober 4, 2023

updated onOctober 4, 2023

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Key notes

Cypressis a purely JavaScript-based front-end testing tool built for the modern web. It aims to address the pain points developers or QA engineers face while testing an application.

Cypress is a more developer-friendly tool that uses a unique DOM manipulation technique and operates directly in the browser. Cypress also provides a unique interactive test runner that executes all commands.

Regardless of its promising features, users have been complaining that cypress failed to connect to Chrome. On other occasions, users claim cypress docker failed to connect to chrome, or that cypress could not verify that this server is running, amongst others.

It is for this that this article poses solutions to the browser-based problems that users face while trying to execute commands using Cypress.

Does Cypress support all browsers?

Cypress has a critical weakness: it cannot natively run tests against all browser types. At the time of writing this article, Cypress supports only a limited set of browsers: Chrome, Edge, Electron, and Firefox.

That means no support for Safari and Internet Explorer (IE). Cypress also doesn’t support mobile browsers.

However, there is a way to run Cypress tests against any browser type, including Safari, IE, and mobile browsers: usingApplitools Visual AIwith theUltrafast Test Cloud.

Does Cypress use Chrome Devtools protocol?

When Cypress controls a Chromium browser, it has an open remote interface connection between Cypress and the browser.

DevTools is invaluable for debugging an application, or understanding why an end-to-end test goes astray. Typically, Cypress uses Chrome Devtools protocol to visit the site and perform special operations like setting cookies or setting the file downloads folder.

During Cypress tests, you can click on any command to see additional information for that command, inspect DOM elements, and observe network calls.

How do I get Cypress to work on Chrome?

1. Update the Chrome browser

Also, checkchromium.cypress.io for links to download a specific released version of Chrome (dev, Canary, and stable) for every platform.

2. Use Chrome-flavored browsers

All Chrome-flavored browsers will be detected and are supported above Chrome 64, such as Chromium, Chrome Beta, Chrome Canary, and others.

3. Debug the Chrome browser

Doing this will aid Cypress to function effectively on Chrome

4. Grant Chrome the Permission to run tests

CheckBrowser.setPermissioncommand to set the permission. By granting the test runner the permission, the browser skips showing the “should this site have access to the clipboard?”user prompt.

5. Do a manual check on the command

It is possible that you wrote an endless loop and that you must fix your own code. It could also be that you are running lots of tests on a memory intense application.

We hope that the above fixes will solve any problem you may encounter. You can also check how to fixchromewebdata buttons error.

Cypress Failed to Connect to Chrome: 5 Ways to Easily Fix it#

Does Cypress support all browsers?#

How do I get Cypress to work on Chrome?#

1. Update the Chrome browser#

2. Use Chrome-flavored browsers#

3. Debug the Chrome browser#

4. Grant Chrome the Permission to run tests#

5. Do a manual check on the command#