I'm working on automated testing of a React/Next application. One of the pages has some logic in a

useEffect()

and then does a

window.open()

passing

_blank

as it's second argument like

window.open(url, "_blank")

which causes it to open in a new tab. While running inside Cypress I want to change this to

_self

so I can test the URL was properly navigated to. At the top of the

useEffect()

I'm setting a variable for this using

const openLocation = window.Cypress ? '_self' : '_blank';

and then passing

openLocation

to the

window.open()

call. The problem I'm running into is

openLocation

is always

_blank

even though when I'm running cypress I can go to the console and do

window.Cypress

and see there is a Cypress object defined there. Is this some sort of race condition?