After updating to R 4.4.0, many different data visualizations that depend on the htmlwidgets library, such as leaflet, echarts4r and highcharter, fail to render in the R Studio Viewer pane. These visualizations do show up in the Viewer pane if I instead use my previous installation of R 4.3.3. I’m assuming that htmlwidgets is the source of the issue, as RMarkdown and Quarto document previews show up without an issue in the Viewer pane, but I could be wrong.

Strangely, when I save the results as an HTML page and open them, the data visualizations work perfectly.

If I inspect the Viewer pane using Developer Tools, I can see that all my data exists inside a selector called <script type="application/json" data-for="htmlwidget-90458e179f447c2a160e">. When I look at the Console tab, I can see that there are several .js resources with the following error message: Failed to load resource: net::ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED.

Thus far, similar questions that I’ve seen posted on Stack Overflow were resolved by installing the latest version of R Studio OR were related to encountering a similar issue on website pages, not inside R Studio’s Viewer pane. I have already updated to the “Chocolate Cosmos” release of R Studio (RStudio/2024.04.0+735) and the issue persists. This is the output I am trying to achieve (and which appears when I export the output to HTML):

Whereas here is an example data set to illustrate what currently happens (note: the citytemp_long data set comes an example data set pre-loaded into highcharter):

library(highcharter)

hchart(
  citytemp_long,
  "line",
  hcaes(x = month, y = temp, group = city)
)

Unfortunately, this results in an empty (or invisible?) plot.

The issue is not exclusive to highcharter, as leaflet and echarts4r also show the same empty outputs. I’ve included my sessionInfo() as well to try to help identify the source of the problem.

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.4.0 (2024-04-24 ucrt)
#> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
#> Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19045)
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> 
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
#> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
#> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
#> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
#> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    
#> 
#> time zone: America/Chicago
#> tzcode source: internal
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] styler_1.10.2     digest_0.6.35     fastmap_1.1.1     xfun_0.43        
#>  [5] magrittr_2.0.3    glue_1.7.0        R.utils_2.12.3    knitr_1.46       
#>  [9] htmltools_0.5.8.1 rmarkdown_2.26    lifecycle_1.0.4   cli_3.6.2        
#> [13] R.methodsS3_1.8.2 vctrs_0.6.5       reprex_2.1.0      withr_3.0.0      
#> [17] compiler_4.4.0    R.oo_1.26.0       R.cache_0.16.0    purrr_1.0.2      
#> [21] rstudioapi_0.16.0 tools_4.4.0       evaluate_0.23     yaml_2.3.8       
#> [25] rlang_1.1.3       fs_1.6.4

^{Created on 2024-05-01 with reprex v2.1.0}