karma + Chrome not working after last auto-update of Chrome

Question

We use jenkins with a number of jenkins slave nodes running on Windows 7. Through jenkins we kick off karma tests to be run on the slave node to run our jasmine tests on the actual browsers. Suddenly last week after Chrome auto-updated to version "38.0.2125.104 m" this stopped working (karma unable to capture the browser). Here are our logs:

[INFO] --- maven-karma-plugin:1.8:start (default-cli) @ module-translation ---
[INFO] Executing Karma Test Suite ...
[INFO] cmd /C karma start C:\dev\util\jenkinsMaster\workspace\ci_module_translation_browser\translation\target\test-classes\frontend\thirdParty\js\com\verisk\underwriting\config\karma-config-module\1.0.3\karma-config-module-1.0.3.js --browsers Chrome --single-run
INFO [karma]: Karma v0.12.5 server started at http://localhost:9876/ 
INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Chrome 
WARN [launcher]: Chrome have not captured in 60000 ms, killing. 
INFO [launcher]: Trying to start Chrome again (1/2). 
WARN [launcher]: Chrome have not captured in 60000 ms, killing. 
INFO [launcher]: Trying to start Chrome again (2/2). 
WARN [launcher]: Chrome have not captured in 60000 ms, killing. 
ERROR [launcher]: Chrome failed 2 times (timeout). Giving up. 

When running locally, the same command (using the karma-maven-plugin) works just fine. The karma plugin just runs the karma executable installed separately (which also works when run locally). Additionally, other browsers work when kicked off from jenkins. They have been working for quite some time now, along with Chrome (until this last update from Chrome). It is only the combination of the three: jenkins + karma + Chrome that is resulting in this issue.

Since Chrome has made it as hard as possible to get an older version, this has been very hard to test or resolve. Everything seems to be pointing to the current version of Chrome as the culprit.

Has anyone else seen this or have a solution?

Answer 1

The fix has been merged into Chromium. The fix is now available through a regular update of Chrome. This works for version Chrome 39.0.2171.