Recurring issue with running protractor (using VS code) and focus on page

[KrisJones]

I'm not sure how to categorize this so apologies if I get this wrong in some way.

I and other people I am working with have encountered a reoccurring issue with testing in VS code, it has gone away and come back a few times now.

When running my current bank of tests, the entire thing is guaranteed to fail via timeout unless I first click the window that protractor is running the tests in manually myself. This includes for instance

run test > no click on page > initial start up fails

run test > click on page > runs initial start up tests >fails on next set of tests

run test > click on page > runs initial start up tests > click new page > continues tests fine

etc

Before this I could leave the tests to execute by themselves and they would run and pass fine, but since updating to new versions they now fail due to this.

This happened previously but went away after updating.

I was previously running chromedriver/chrome 76 but recently updated to 78 which brought this back.

I am honestly not sure if this is a bug, or just something I have failed to understand about protractor/selenium so I was hoping people could point me in the right direction with this.

[Xfaramir]

Are you running protractor from your node_modules or just using protractor globally?
I would recommend something like this to avoid this issues :

Try running your conf file like this :

./node_modules/protractor/bin/protractor ./e2e/protractor.conf.js

[KrisJones]

Hello :) this is indeed how i've got it set up, but thank you for the suggestion.