Why are plotly-rendered graphs not working on Mozilla

Question

I am getting the following error when trying to open an html document put together with knitr in Mozilla Firefox. The error is a result of the graph element composed with the plotly package.

unknownError: error occurred while processing 
'getCachedMessages: out of memory

The entire contents of the rmarkdown file (default everything else):

library(plotly)
library(ggplot2)
theData <- data.frame(A=1:26, B=letters, C=rnorm(26,19))

g<-ggplot(theData, aes(x=A, y=C)) +
  geom_point()
ggplotly(g)

I have the most recent version of Firefox. I don't seem to have trouble viewing other pages with plotly elements on them. The page works in IE, no problem.

Outdoors

Works fine with Firefox 50.1.0 / win 7 – Autotoxin

I have 50.1.0/win 10 but I am have problems viewing ploty rendered graphs in RMarkdown – Aleris

Answer 1

(apologies - I do not have enough points to respond in comments)

I get same problem with R + Rmd + plotly + Firefox (but no issue with IE or Opera). The following issues have been raised at Github / ropensci / plotly - but no solutions as of 2017-01-20 :

1. plotly + FlexDashboard + Firefox = huge memory consumption #721
2. Very bad performance of RMarkdown in Firefox #483
3. R library: Big slowdown in Firefox but not in Chrome #17 (github / plotly / plotly.js / issues / 17)

Delenadeleon

I'm experiencing the same problem too. – Camelback

Answer 2

So far (2018-05-08) it seems that this issue persists. But there is a workaround which cpsievert mentions on GitHub (see camelCase's answer for the links).

You have to add self_contained: false to the YAML header like this:

---
title: "Your title"
output:
  html_document:
    self_contained: false
---

The problem with this hack is that you will no longer have a standalone .html file. Please, see the topic Document Dependencies at https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/html_document_format.html for more details.

Mutiny